


Hex Game

by airdeari



Category: Original Work, Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Mystery, NaNoWriMo, a zero escape game takes place in a universe where the zero escape video game series exists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-08-28 14:19:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 17
Words: 50,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8449546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airdeari/pseuds/airdeari
Summary: “I know it’s about multiple universes. I know we didn’t play the game right, I get it. But if you don’t help us escape right now, we’re all going to die.”“No, I don’t think that’s true.”His lips were smiling, but his eyes were dead. His eyes had always been dead.“We’re not all going to die,” he said. “One person is planning on living. There’s no way Zero rigged this to kill him, too.”His hand was in and out of his pocket in a flash. The gleam of steel burned her half-open eyes.“So I’ll make sure that everyone dies, if it’s the last thing I do.”





	1. Video Games

**Author's Note:**

> Howdy folks! I'm a bit wary about posting this in the ZE tag since it's basically original fiction that happens to share a premise with (and overtly reference) the games but. I guess this is your warning that you will see no Zero Escape characters. What you will see are puzzles, dilemmas, mysteries, murder, multiple timelines, and sudden information dumps about something obscure and tangential. (and typos because I'm posting these straight to AO3 as soon as I finish a chapter so that I can force myself not to waste all my time editing sorry everyone)
> 
> If you'd like to play along and solve the mystery, know that even if a character appears to be kind of narrating a segment, that is certainly not a guarantee that they are giving you the whole story. I hope you can find it within you to befriend some of them anyway.

The chamber, as the players would come to disdainfully call it, was decidedly Spartan in décor, but had just enough spruce to make it feel homey. A long carpet mat covered a narrow stretch of the concrete floor in the hallway area, while an oblong throw rug in warm tones brightened up the more open area. A potted plant sat on an end table beside the door that carried a brass plate denoting a unisex single-occupancy bathroom. On the opposite wall was another door with a passcode lock, marked with a brass number 6. It was enough to convince the young woman waking up on the ground that she was perhaps in a hall of an apartment building.

“Shit, man,” she groaned, holding the side of her head that harbored an unpleasant ache. “The hell did I smoke last night?”

As she came to her senses, she saw the slumped form of another body just a few feet away from her. She jerked her head up, only to see two more bodies on the floor. The one closest to her shifted with breath. Her heart started to beat again, but too quickly.

One person was conscious. He looked like nothing more than a teenager, his pudgy, pale face pitted with pimples. An awkwardly short haircut gave him a distinctly egg-shaped head, and consequently a pronounced roundness to his body. His big, droopy eyes, framed by long lashes, were fixed on the center of the empty wall behind her.

“Whatcha lookin’ at there, kid?” she muttered.

He barely spared her a glance before lifting an arm, his hand swallowed by the sleeve of his grey hoodie, vaguely towards the wall and giving a shrug.

Despite her woozy limbs, the young woman staggered to her feet to get a better look. On the white wall, a slide was projected from a device on the ceiling. She squinted to read it through the fuzz lingering in her vision.

**THE HEX GAME BEGINS IN**

**15:48**

_Zero awaits you_

They watched in silence as eleven seconds ticked by, and the time remaining was down to 15:37.

“You got any idea what a hex game is?” she asked him.

The boy shook his head.

“Zero awaits you,” she read. “’Cuz it’s going down? It’ll hit zero?”

He shrugged. After a moment, he looked her over, not quite from head to toe, more from chest-level to toe and then all the way up to head. He started a little when he first looked her in the eye.

“Whoa, you’re, uh…”

He traced a finger along his cheekbone, wincing a little. She held a hand to the same spot on her own face, exactly on the epicenter of the strange ache in her head.

“It’s all bruised up,” he said.

“Neato,” she sighed. “What’s your name, anyway?”

His steely blue eyes went wide and he shook his head, pointing up at a corner in the ceiling. Black and bold, as if daring to be noticed, a security camera surveyed the room.

“Where the fuck _are_ we?” she uttered.

He shrugged and shook his head again. “Wherever it is, we’re stuck,” he mumbled. “Tried all the doors. They’re locked.”

She sifted through her memories, but the most recent days blended together and seemed to have neither start nor end. Her warm, brown skin peeked through the slashes in her silver tights, stretched taut around her full legs and tucked into black boots and booty shorts. There was a cold spot on her soft belly where her bare skin had been pressed against concrete from underneath a yellow crop top draped over a dark, lacy bra. Fewer of her thickly-coiled, violet-streaked twists swam over her shoulders and down her back than usual; she touched the top of her head and found the rest of them piled in a bun leaning towards her left. So, her usual attire. She could have been doing anything before she ended up here.

The teen glanced over his shoulder. “You know these other people?” he asked.

She looked down at the three still lying unconscious on the floor. She could never forget that frizzy, curly brown ponytail on the lanky man beginning to stir, nor the pinched, heart-shaped face of the petite woman just beside him.

“Yeah, I know those two,” she said, pointing them out. “How about—?”

“Wait, what?” he blurted, letting his jaw hang open even after the words were out. His voice cracked a little whenever he was surprised.

“You don’t know anybody else here?” she realized.

“Who _are_ they?” he demanded.

 “Cameras, bud!”

The tall, thin man with an olive complexion lifted his head from the concrete. Loose curls drifted into his angular face as he frowned, trying to identify the voice echoing off of the walls.

“Hey, don’t say my name whenever you figure out who I am,” she told him, hands on her hips. “We got some video cameras on us and… and shit’s weird.”

He wrinkled his long, narrow nose as he slowly turned to face her. His broad mouth opened and then shut when he recognized the woman standing before him. He relaxed into his usual easy grin under lidded eyes.

“Long time no see,” he replied lazily. “Ooh, nice face. What’s about not sayin’ names?”

“Look left, man,” she said.

He looked to his left and found a hallway with a plethora of doors.

“Uh, other left.”

He looked to his right. The sight of the petite woman lying beside him was enough to send him straight to his feet.

“Aw, shit.” He threaded his fingers through his curls and scratched the back of his head. “Did I get fucked up last night?”

“Right there with ya, dude,” she sighed. “Can’t remember a damn thing. We’re all locked in here, there’s a creepy camera up in the corner”—she pointed it out to him—“and we got some kinda countdown goin’ on.”

The man squinted at it in disdain.

**THE HEX GAME BEGINS IN**

**13:17**

_Zero awaits you_

“How long’s it been going?” he asked.

She turned to the boy. He swallowed and said, “I think I woke up around eighteen minutes.”

“Whoa, really?” she asked. “So we’re all waking up at the same time?”

The man glanced at the petite woman and shuddered. “Looks as though I haven’t got long to live,” he joked, lifting his wrist to check his watch just before he immediately jerked it far away from his body.

“Don’t touch it,” warned the boy, sliding up his left sleeve to expose the underside of his wrist. “It’s got needles on the inside or something. There’s not a latch to open it, and if you try to pull it…”

A blotch of dark red peeked out from under the thick, watch-like bracelet affixed to his arm. The face had three buttons, numbered from one to three, alongside a short code printed in white. They all had the same bracelets on their own left wrists, as did the two women sleeping on the ground. One of them was moving. Both of them were moving.

The petite woman scrunched up her eyes, decorated with pristinely winged eyeliner. She found the movement of her arms impeded by the sharp-shouldered blazer with an hourglass mold that she was clearly wearing for fun since she paired it with skinny, aqua corduroys, strappy platform heels, and what looked like a band t-shirt. Her sleek, dark hair looked good in her new style of a chin-length bob.

“Don’t say our names,” the black woman warned again. “Nobody say anybody’s names, just, just hold on a sec until we figure out what the hell’s going on.”

She opened her hard, brown eyes. Their sharp slant made her always look angry, but she was clearly livid when her eyes fell upon the thin man.

“What the fuck are _you_ doing here?!” she growled.

“Missed you, too, babe,” he replied. “Any idea where ‘here’ is, by chance?”

“Don’t you _fucking_ call me that!”

The other woman was larger but younger if the dry texture and uneven tone of her bleached hair emerging from underneath pink dye was any indication of her youth. She had a bone structure that made her extra weight look imposing before it looked soft or chubby. She adjusted the position of plum plastic glasses on her sharp little nose to take in her surroundings.

“I don’t want to be here anymore than you do, sweetheart.” The man held up his hands before the woman standing a full foot underneath him.

“Call me that _one_ more time, asshole,” she spat. “I fucking _dare_ you.”

It was only from up close that her Chinese roots showed in her face: the weakness of the creases in her eyelids, the flatness of her button nose. Her skin was creamy with only a hint of gold.

The other girl gave them a wide berth as she sought a better vantage point to read the message projected on the wall.

**THE HEX GAME BEGINS IN**

**11:35**

_Zero awaits you_

“Hex Game?” she repeated in a scratchy voice stretched by sleep. “Zero?”

“No, we don’t know what’s going on, either,” replied the black woman, backing away from the squabble between her acquaintances. “There’s a camera up in the corner, so don’t say too much, and all the doors are locked—”

She whipped her hand to the left sleeve of her purple hoodie and hiked it up to her elbow in the blink of an eye, exposing the black bracelet.

“Don’t try to pull it off, hon, there’s needles in the—”

But her eyes were already locked onto the door on the side wall, adorned as apartment number 6. “ _Hex_ Game,” she uttered.

She dove into the hallway that branched off from the main area of the chamber, running her hands along the doors that lined it. The woman’s shoulders fell limp. “They’re all locked, I just said…”

“Six doors, maybe,” she muttered as she emerged from the hallway, gripping the corner in the wall as her eyes darted across the room.

“Everything okay over there?”

“Was there anyone else here?” she demanded. “There’s only five people. Someone’s missing.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up, you sound like you know shit.” She cupped her manicured fingers around her mouth. “Everyone shut up and _listen_! Somebody _knows_ shit!”

The girl came out of her laser focus in a single blink. She shifted her large body to become smaller, hiking up her shoulders to her ears and turning her toes towards each other.

“I, um,” she stammered, glancing nervously at each set of eyes. “So… um, hi, everybody. This is… I think this is from a video game.”

The tall man’s already at-ease expression relaxed further. “What video game?” he asked.

“It’s called, um…” She stared at the timer on the wall. “I think we better find the sixth person first, before time runs out.”

“That’s a funny name for a video game,” said the woman tangling her long twists between her fingers. She received a jab in the arm from the half-Chinese woman.

“What’s the sixth person?” she demanded. “Why’s there a sixth person? Where? How do you know?”

“It’s—well, it’s a guess,” responded the timid girl. “Just, _hex_ is probably for six, like in hexagon. So there should be six people.”

“That’s a shit explanation, but…” The black woman held her hands around her mouth again. “ _Hey!_ Anybody else here?!”

Her voice rang in the high-ceilinged hall. She was about to speak again when a soft, muffled response sounded something like, “Hello?”

She could not place the location of the sound, but the pudgy boy leapt towards the door with the restroom sign. He tugged on the doorknob that would not yield and banged his fists against the door.

“Are you there?!” he called. “Who’s in there?!”

“Whoa, have a little decency, dude!” The black woman jogged in beside, the heels of her boots clicking on the concrete. “Someone’s probably takin’ a shit in there. Leave ’em alone.”

“You think that’s really a bathroom?!” he snapped. His voice was cracking again. “There’s weird shit on all the doors—the six, the weird painting, that essay, the…”

Softly, from the other side, came the high, tremulous voice again, saying, “I’m scared.”

“Is everything okay in there, honey?” called the woman. “Can you get out? We can’t open the door.”

“O-okay.”

And just like that, one of the locked doors in the chamber was opened. Unfortunately, the chubby boy was wrong to assume it was not a bathroom beyond the door, because it most certainly was: a single stall restroom with a half-empty bottle of hand soap balanced on the edge of the sink and an extra roll of toilet paper underneath it.

A tiny young thing peeked out from behind the door, gazing up with big, dark eyes lined with tears. A puffy pink sweater, adorned with sewn-on cats cut from felt of multiple colors, swallowed the thin figure that her knobby knees betrayed when they emerged, albeit adorned in woolen tights, from her black skirt. She looked South Asian by the rich color of her skin and the hook of her nose.

“Alright, you’re _way_ too young for this to just be all of us drinking too much last night,” said the woman. “What’s your name, sweetie?”

“You said we weren’t supposed to say anybody’s names!” yelled the petite woman.

“I—I don’t know.”

The chamber fell silent.

“You don’t know?” the boy repeated, stone-faced. “You mean, you don’t know your name?”

The girl shook her hair, swishing a thick, black braid in slight disarray.

“Um, okay,” piped up the girl with the bleached hair. “This is—this is _definitely_ based on a video game.”

“What the fuck is this video game?!” shouted the boy in a squeaky voice. His hands had begun to shake.

“Okay, first, call me K,” said the girl. “We’re going to pick codenames eventually, probably. That’s where this is heading.”

She inhaled as if ready to explain, then froze and glanced around at the group.

“This is… kind of a really complicated video game series,” she mumbled. “I don’t know how much to go into it, if it’s…”

“How about you just tell as much as you can in the next, I don’t know, seven minutes and twelve seconds?” suggested the tall man.

**THE HEX GAME BEGINS IN**

**7:12**

_Zero awaits you_

“Right. Seven minutes.” K exhaled, then inhaled again. “Okay. So this all lines up pretty solid with this video game trilogy called Zero Escape.”

The tall man sat himself on the ground with a sigh and crossed his legs pretzel style. One by one, the others made themselves comfortable on the floor, as well, aside from the woman with some kind of personal vendetta against him, probably just to be contrary.

“In each of the games,” K said, “a group of people gets drugged and kidnapped and forced to play a game to escape wherever they’ve been taken to.”

“Oh, man, I’ve always wanted to do one of those escape-the-room things!” gushed the woman whose long twists bounced as she leaned forward in excitement.

K winced. “Um… I mean, me too, probably because of the video games, but this is… this is different,” she said. “The game always has a—the escape game—a really strong numerical theme. The first ones were called the Nonary Game, so the number nine, and the third one was the Decision Game, where the _deci-_ part was for ten. And that number just shows up everywhere in the game. It’s the number of players, it’s the number on the door to get out. So that”—she pointed across the room to the door with the keypad and the number six—“is the exit. This is the Hex Game. Six players. Six rooms down that hallway. We get out through door six. We’ll probably have six hours to escape before…”

She glanced at her wrist, turning it over to look at the bracelet.

“Okay, most important thing—I should’ve mentioned this first.” She held out her hand. “These bracelets are here to punish us if we lose, or if we don’t play the game like we’re supposed to.”

“Punish us how?” asked the petite woman, who had finally taken a seat.

“Um, probably… there’s needles, right? Probably injecting us with a poison and killing us. That’s how it happened in the second game.”

The girl in the cat sweater gasped and clutched her wrist.

“Don’t, kitty-girl, you’ll hurt yourself on the needles,” said the woman with the twists. “Can we call you kitty-girl? Kitty? We’ll call you Kitty.”

Kitty nodded to accept the designated codename but was not successfully distracted from staring in horror at her bracelet.

“Can _we_ call _you_ Mary-Jane?” joked the tall man.

Mary-Jane gave a dazzling smile when she laughed. “I can’t even fight that. Alright, I’ll be Mary-Jane.”

“Codenames later, explanation of how to not fucking _die_ from poisoning _now_ ,” snapped the petite woman.

“C’mon, it’s funny. We all know why it’s funny. Ask me when you’re older, Kitty.”

“I think everyone knows it’s about weed by the time they’re her age,” said the tall man.

The petite woman scowled. “K, for the love of God, keep talking.”

“Okay, well, codenames are kind of part of it,” K murmured. “In the first game, everyone picked codenames. But it ended up hiding everyone’s identities from each other when they could have figured out how their lives were all interconnected, so I don’t really know if it’s a good idea to use codenames. It might go against Zero’s plans.”

“Sorry, whose plans?” asked the tall man.

“Zer—Oh!”

K pointed at the projector. They expected to find it close to the end of the countdown, but they still had a little under five minutes remaining. The message was otherwise unchanged.

“That line, Zero awaits you,” she said. “Zero is the person who brought us all here. Zero is—”

“You know who brought us here?!” exclaimed Mary-Jane.

“N-no, no, no, it’s just—Zero is the nickname the game host takes on,” K explained. “There’ve been three Zeroes in the video games. Four if you count the AI rabbit, but… okay, never mind, complicated. There’s a lot of stuff that’s _always_ true about Zero, no matter who it is.”

She swallowed, curling and uncurling her fingers under her gaze.

“First of all, Zero is kind of a… a vigilante hero, actually,” she said. “Whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it for a reason. It might be kind of selfish, and it’s definitely illegal—kidnapping and death threats and all—but it’s always for the greater good somehow. Like, the first game ended up with Zero saving their own life and also punishing a bunch of really terrible criminals. The second one was done to prepare people to prevent a predestined apocalypse. The third one was… to prevent another predestined apocalypse, let’s say. It’s more, uh, complex than that. And the only way to accomplish those goals was to put everyone in a dangerous or life-threatening situation.”

“So someone kidnapped us,” said the pale boy, “and that’s supposed to be _good_?”

“That’s a personal opinion,” said K with a shrug. “The attention to detail here makes me trust this Zero so far, but…”

“This isn’t a video game,” he said sharply.

K flinched and turned it into a nod. “Y-yeah. Exactly.”

“Three minutes left,” Mary-Jane warned. “Anything else?”

“Yes! Yes, a lot else,” K said in a high, tight voice. “Zero—that’s the biggest thing about—Zero is one of the players. Zero is _always_ one of the players.”

The air in the room turned cold as frosty stares shot across the room at one another.

“Don’t stop trusting each other because of that!” K pleaded, pounding her fists against her thighs. “We have to work together to get out of here, even if one of us is Zero.”

“Who said I ever fucking trusted any of you?” muttered the petite woman.

“Language!” gasped Mary-Jane, holding her hands over Kitty’s ears.

“It’s okay,” mumbled Kitty, shrugging her shoulders up to shield her ears from Mary-Jane’s hands.

“Yeah, I especially don’t trust _her_ ,” the woman snapped. Her hair flared out as she shot a glare at Kitty. “You just pop out of nowhere and you say you don’t know your own name?”

“Stop, wait, that’s part of it,” K cut in. “There’s… there’s a bunch of archetypes for the players. There’s always an amnesiac. It’s always generalized amnesia—they don’t know anything about their identity or their past—and it’s always real. They’re never Zero. They might be related to Zero somehow, but they’re never Zero, and they’re never lying about the amnesia.”

“This isn’t a video game,” the pudgy boy repeated. His face was beginning to gather into a grimace.

“Guys, we don’t have much time left, please!” K’s eyes were frantic. “There’s other archetypes, there’s always…”

She trailed off as she stared at Mary-Jane, or rather let her gaze drift down across Mary-Jane.

“Something wrong?” Mary-Jane asked.

“Um. Just.” Color gathered in K’s full cheeks. “You’re either a genius computer hacker, a secret government agent, or a serial killer, if we’re going by the video games.”

The tall man laughed and hid behind his raised arms in jest. “Well, sure as hell isn’t the first two,” he teased, “so we better watch out.”

“Aw, I could be a secret agent, c’mon!”

“The last one’s really, really, important,” K interrupted. “Every game always has multiple espers.”

Mary-Jane had heard the word _esper_ before, but she thought it must have a different meaning in this context, so she asked, “What’s an esper?”

“Someone with psychic abilities,” K said. “They use something like telepathy, but they also have this ability to jump through different points in time inside their own bodies, like their mind could jump back a few minutes so they can undo a mistake they almost made.”

“Sorry, pardon the interruption,” said the tall man with a gentle, broad smile, “but what the actual fuck?”

“It’s—it’s based on a phenomenon scientists are really studying,” said K, wringing her hands. “Rupert Sheldrake is researching something called the morphogenetic field, where human consciousness is linked togeth—”

“This. _Isn’t._ A video game,” said the pale boy for the third time. His teeth were gritted and bared.

“Jesus, just let her finish, we’ve got like forty seconds,” Mary-Jane said. “Except, like, don’t talk science, because no one gives a shit.”

“Right. Okay. So there’s espers,” K said quickly. “Well, it’s possible there’s only one esper, since there’s not many of us in the game.”

“It’s not possible there are _any_ espers,” said the tall man, “because that’s a pseudoscientific concept at best and more than likely complete _bullshit_ , you absolute _loon_.”

“But there _has_ to be an esper,” protested K. “This game— _none_ of the games can be won on the first try.”

Mary-Jane straightened and stiffened her back as she frowned. “The first try?” she repeated. “Didn’t you say we’d get poisoned if we lost?”

“Yeah, which is why we need at least one esper to go back in time and play the game again,” K said. “It’s quantum physics, it’s complicated. If we’re lucky, somebody here came back with the memories of prior games, and they’ll be able to make the right decisions this time around so we can win.”

“What if we’re not lucky?”

K stared at the countdown on the wall ticking down the few remaining seconds.

“Then we’re all going to die,” she said.

**THE HEX GAME BEGINS IN**

**00:04**

“Any chance,” said Mary-Jane,

**00:03**

“anyone remembers—”

**00:02**

“—playing this game—”

**00:01**

“—before?”

**00:00**

Silence.

**WELCOME TO THE HEX GAME**

**66:00**

“Well,” she said,

**65:59**

“fuck.”

**65:58**

**…**


	2. The Stable Matching Problem

Underneath the ominous welcoming message and the silently ticking timer, a long block of smaller text appeared on the projected image. Its heading read _Rules_ , and as soon as K pointed this out, the whole team scrambled closer to the wall to read.

> All of you have been brought here for a reason. The Q-Type players are here to find the right questions. The A-Type players are here to answer those questions. By your combined efforts, you will solve the mystery of the Hex Game and escape this place.

“Wait, who’s Q-Type and A-Type?” interjected Mary-Jane.

K checked her bracelet with a small frown. “This might be… Does everyone’s bracelet say ‘Q3’ beside the buttons?” she asked.

“Mine says Q2,” Kitty said in a small voice.

“Oh, I got A3,” said Mary-Jane. “So that’s the—?”

The tall man cut her off with a bark of a laugh as he looked at his bracelet. “Sorry,” he said, rubbing his eye with his other hand. “I just… Mine’s A1. Like A1 Steak Sauce. There’s your codename.” He threw up his hands and let them fall against his cargo pants. “Call me Steak Sauce.”

The joke earned a chuckle from Kitty and a scoff from the petite woman who had a beef with him.

“What about you?” Mary-Jane asked her scowling acquaintance. “How about Miss Grumpypants?”

“Shut the fuck up and read the rules,” she snapped. “We only have 64 minutes to not die.”

> The premise of the Hex Game is to enter the Hex Rooms in small groups and solve the puzzles within. When you do so, I will provide you with further hints as to how you might win the Hex Game as you progress.
> 
> To win the Hex Game, you must escape in 66 minutes. The exit door unlocks when the correct password is entered. If the incorrect password is entered, you forfeit the game.

“What about Titanic?” suggested Mary-Jane.

K flinched. The petite woman glared at Mary-Jane.

“Think about it,” Mary-Jane said, winking. “See how I got it?”

For a moment, she lost her constant grimace as she tried to follow the train of thought that led to that nickname. When she found it, her rage returned at double its previous volume. “It’s not even _spelled_ like that!” she roared.

“I’m calling you Titanic,” Steak Sauce declared with a smile. “Arguing wastes time, right? Keep reading the rules, Titanic.”

> The Hex Rooms are the six rooms in the narrow hall behind you. You will enter them in two stages, three at a time. In the first stage, you will enter the three rooms closest to the restroom. In the second stage, you will enter the three rooms closest to the exit door.
> 
> The doors to the Hex Rooms are currently locked. They will remain locked until the conditions are appropriate. The first Hex Rooms will open as soon as the matches are calculated and displayed so that you may immediately enter and progress. The second Hex Rooms will open five minutes after the completion of the first Hex Rooms to allow time for you to share information as well as to read the additional information I will supply upon your exit.
> 
> In each stage, the Hex Rooms are all identical. It does not matter to me which of the Rooms you enter as long as you enter with only your designated partner. Once you enter, the door will lock behind you. There are two methods by which you may unlock the door and complete your Hex Room.
> 
>   1. You solve the brief puzzle within the Hex Room to find the escape password.
>   2. You accept a Hex, which will automatically unlock the door after its duration.
> 

> 
> It is inevitable that you may not be able to solve a puzzle inside a Hex Room. Perhaps you find yourselves stumped. Perhaps the skills required to solve the puzzle are simply not within your knowledge. If you find this is the case, you may press the large red button by the door to activate and accept a Hex.
> 
> The essential function of a Hex is to unlock the door after a delay. This delay is contingent on the escape of other pairs from their own Hex Rooms, or it will be purely time-based if all pairs elect to accept a Hex simultaneously. This timer will last significantly longer than it would take for a knowledgeable person to solve a puzzle, therefore it may be in your best interest to attempt the puzzle. However, it is also imperative that you decide quickly whether or not you want to accept the Hex in case it is a time-based delay, as the timers for all teams will only begin once the button is pressed. You would not want to incur an additional delay.
> 
> The purpose of a Hex is to set aside the small puzzle in front of you in exchange for an opportunity to solve the larger puzzle surrounding this game. The A-Type players each hold within them the reason that I have gathered us all here today. It is the responsibility of the Q-Type players to draw out this knowledge and help unravel this mystery together. While you wait for the Hex to pass, ask questions, and give answers.

“Okay, I don’t know what the hell this is talking about, because I don’t know why we’re here,” Mary-Jane stated. “Steak Sauce, you know? Who else is A-Type?”

Titanic glanced at her bracelet and raised her hand with a shrug.

“Of course it’s all three of us,” sighed Steak Sauce. “So it’s gotta be something related to us, but we’ve been friends for years. Doesn’t narrow things down at all.”

“We aren’t friends anymore,” Titanic snapped.

“What a loss I have suffered, to no longer experience the _joys_ of your companionship,” Steak Sauce said in a lilting, dramatic voice.

> You will enter the Hex Rooms in pairs of one Q-Type player and one A-Type player. These pairs cannot be repeated; i.e., if two players enter a first Hex Room together, they may not enter a second Hex Room together, as well.
> 
> I would like for you to be able to fairly select your partners without being pressured by public opinion. This is the reason for the buttons on the face of your bracelets numbered from 1 to 3. You will press these buttons in order of preference of partners from the opposite team. For instance, if an A-Type player prefers players Q2, Q3, and Q1 in that order, the A-Type player should press the buttons in the order 2, 3, 1.
> 
> Once you have confirmed your ordering, press the side button to submit. LEDs in the buttons will confirm the order you have submitted. A simple computer algorithm will then match partners for the first and second stages of the Hex Rooms and project the matches once calculated.

“A simple computer algorithm?” repeated Kitty.

“Yeah, like a computer’s gonna run through our answers and see who wants to be with who and spit out some matches,” replied Mary-Jane.

“The simple algorithm would…” Kitty frowned and held her hands to her temples. Her fingers curled around the hair at her scalp, loosening strands from her braid. “The simple algorithm is biased towards one side. It benefits the suitors.”

Steak Sauce’s eyes went wide. “Sorry, _what_?”

Kitty shook her head, eyes squeezed shut. “I _know_ this algorithm,” she whispered. “It has a name, it’s… it’s called…”

“If you remember the name of an _algorithm_ but not your _own_ fucking name,” Titanic growled.

“Wait, how old are you?!” shouted Mary-Jane. “You look like you’re in middle school, but—”

“She probably doesn’t know how old she is,” K pointed out.

“The stable matching problem!”

All eyes turned to Kitty’s bright face. Titanic’s jaw dropped. “She seriously remembered the name of an algorithm,” she muttered.

“Is this important?” asked Steak Sauce, thumbing over his broad, bony shoulder at the remaining rules and the ticking clock. “Because we’ve got a bit of an agenda already, looks like.”

“I don’t know,” Kitty murmured. “I’m just a little confused. If it really uses the simple solution to the stable matching problem, then it’ll be biased towards one team’s preferences. I know that’s how it works. I think the algorithm to find an unbiased solution is really complicated, so… so Zero wouldn’t specifically call it ‘simple’.”

“So what team gets the bias?” asked Mary-Jane.

“Exactly,” answered Kitty. “It doesn’t say. I don’t get it.”

“Well, whatever team Zero’s on, right?” Steak Sauce said. “So he can have the upper hand. And he doesn’t tell us which team’s got the bias, otherwise we’d narrow him down to one of three people.”

“Can you not call Zero a ‘he’?” grumbled the only other male in the room. “Kind of sounds like an accusation when you’re saying it.”

“Hey, um… you,” said K, pointing at him. “Are you feeling okay?”

> If you do not escape within 66 minutes, your bracelets will inject a toxic substance into your veins and you will die immediately.

“Shit, you called it, K,” mumbled Mary-Jane.

> If you attempt to tamper with the bracelets or force them off, you will trigger an auto-inject feature that will inject a toxic substance into your veins and you will die immediately.

The boy sucked in a gasp and checked his bracelet.

“S’been almost a half-hour,” Mary-Jane pointed out. “That’s not very immediate, if it actually triggered. You’re probably fine.”

> If you do not enter a Hex Room with your designated partner and with only your designated partner, the Hex Room door will permanently lock behind you, your bracelets will inject a toxic substance into your veins, and you will die immediately.
> 
> If you enter the incorrect password for the Number 6 Door, your bracelets will inject a toxic substance into your veins and you will die immediately.
> 
> If you try to cheat or impede the process of the Hex Game in any way, your bracelets will inject a toxic substance into your veins and you will die immediately.
> 
> I wish you the best of luck. I am watching.
> 
> \- Zero

“Hey,” said the boy. “I got an idea for a codename.”

“Let’s hear it,” said Mary-Jane.

“Well, I’m player Q1, so…” He held up his bracelet. “I wanna be One. I’m greater than Zero.”

“Points for style, but overall, pretty lame, dude,” she replied.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem
> 
> Full disclaimer: I mostly skimmed this article to refresh my memory, so no promises on its readability. This stuff is mind-numbing to me, and it's my field of study.


	3. First Hex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **IMPORTANT NOTE:** If you're reading this as it goes live, know that I made an error in the last chapter and forgot to mention that, if the players input the wrong password for the number six door, they'll be killed. That's why nobody tries anything with it. I'll be fixing that shortly.
> 
> In the meantime, enjoy this character development! It's a wonder what kind of magic happens when you separate your characters into smaller groups. Highly recommended.

“Is everyone good on the rules?” K asked. “We should start voting. There’s less than an hour left to get through two rooms.”

“Does the algorithms expert have any advice for this?” asked Steak Sauce. “Any tricks we should know?”

Kitty frowned, digging through her few remaining memories. “Is there a way to manipulate it?” she wondered aloud. “You would have to know all of the other choices to manipulate it. We don’t even know who the suitors and reviewers are.”

“So just wing it, huh,” he sighed.

“We vote for people on the opposite team, right?” Mary-Jane asked. “I know One’s one, but what were the other numbers, again?”

Steak Sauce raised his left hand with a single finger raised. “Everybody hold up your number with your left hand,” he suggested, “while you’re punching in your order with your right hand.”

Titanic made a disgruntled face as she held up two fingers, upset that he had made a clever suggestion. One held up his single finger and took a few cautious steps back, curling his fingers around his bracelet like a shield as he made his selections. Mary-Jane, holding up three fingers in the meantime, leaned over towards him with a frown, only to see him jerk away.

“Why are you looking?” he demanded, holding his left hand close to his chest.

“Why are you hiding?” she asked, hands on her round hips.

“Kitty _just_ said you can manipulate it if you know other people’s choices.”

“No, she said you could manipulate it if you knew _everyone’s_ choices, plus something else I didn’t understand that she said we don’t know.”

One glanced around the room, not quite meeting anyone’s eyes. “I don’t want you guys to know what I’m putting in,” he mumbled. “That’s the whole point, right?”

“Everything’s probably different because it’s selecting the top two matches,” murmured Kitty. “Maybe the sides alternate who has the bias between rounds. Exploiting it might even be easier, somehow.”

“So quit looking,” snapped One.

“Yeah, whatever,” Mary-Jane muttered. “Hit the side button when we’re done, he said?”

Steak Sauce shuddered. “Oof, yeah, that _does_ sound weird when someone else calls Zero ‘he’ with all these chicks around. Sorry about earlier, dude.”

“What, you want us to say ‘he or she’ every time?” Titanic grumbled.

“Singular they. Be progressive!” Mary-Jane replied with a dazzling smile.

“Hit the side button. Mine looks like it worked,” said K. She continued to stare at her bracelet as if expecting something more from it after it stopping flashing.

The red LEDs behind each button blinked back at them as they submitted their preference lists. One covered his lights with an open palm, glaring at Mary-Jane all the while.

The projector shifted its text again. The rules shrank and regrouped into two columns instead of three as they slid off to the left side of the screen. On the right side, a message briefly read, “ **All votes received. Calculating…** ” before fading into a new heading.

**FIRST HEX**

**Q1, A3**

**Q2, A1**

**Q3, A2**

**Proceed to the unlocked Hex Rooms**

Kitty beamed to see her code number next to A1. Steak Sauce replied with a grin and a thumbs-up. Mary-Jane frowned at One, who did not meet her eyes when she turned his way. K and Titanic shrugged at each other. With soft, simultaneous clicks, the deadbolts retracted from three doors behind them.

“Doors on the bathroom side, right?” said Steak Sauce, leaning into the narrow hall. “Anybody care which doors we pick?”

“Hold on,” One said. “There was something I wanted to ask about all the stuff hanging on the doors.”

Each side of the hall seemed to have a theme. On the right side, the still-looked doors were painted with small, stylized letters. There was an h with a cross through its highest line, an m with a loop on its final line, and an s with the mouth of a snake at one end. The left doors, which had just come unlocked, seemed to share a theme of 8.5” by 11” papers taped onto the metal. First was a print-out of a dark painting of a hideous beast, or perhaps two, if the bottom sets of horned heads were attached to a separate body emerging from the sea beneath the first many-headed beast. The second was the first page of a double-spaced essay riddled with red pen and adorned with a large F at the top of the page. Last was a paper entirely coated in deep blue ink.

“Does anyone else feel like a door is… related to you, somehow?” One asked. “Because… because that’s _my_ essay. The one with the F. My name’s whited out, but I got a look at it earlier when I was checking the doors. _I_ wrote that.”

“Ooh, that’s embarrassing,” joked Mary-Jane.

“That wasn’t my grade!” he protested. “Zero must’ve wrote that on it. They printed out another copy of my essay somehow and put all that shit on it. Nobody ever gets a paper back that just says F on it in high school. We don’t even have fucking F’s at my school, we use E, because they don’t want to hurt our feelings.”

Steak Sauce laughed once. “Yeah, he’s got a point,” he said. “Anybody’s names start with H or M or something? I know we’ve got an S. Not naming names or pointing fingers, but I happen to know there’s an S.”

“The H is a planetary symbol,” K corrected. “I… I don’t remember which planet, but it’s… I’ve seen it before. It’s a symbol for a planet.”

“And the M is for Virgo,” said Mary-Jane. “I think that’s the one that’s Virgo. It might be Scorpio, I mix those two up.”

“Well, if that’s for the zodiac, and it’s right next to the snake S,” said Titanic, “would that be for the Chinese zodiac? Year of the Snake?”

“Okay, anybody a snake?” asked Steak Sauce, exhaustion in his voice.

“I think that’s ’89,” Titanic said. “I’m ’88, and the year after me was Snake, I remember that.”

“Or is anybody a weird hydra-man beast thing?” Steak Sauce continued, pointing at the ugly painting. “Oh, look, I found mine, my favorite color’s blue.”

“That’s purple, you idiot,” retorted Titanic.

“I think it’s indigo,” said Mary-Jane.

“Everybody just pick a fucking room!” One shouted in his cracking voice. “Zero’s fucking with me, whatever, we’ll figure it out later!”

Steak Sauce gestured Kitty over to the farthest room with the disputed color on the door. Mary-Jane joined One at the door with his failed essay. Titanic and K took the first door with the many-headed beasts when it was the only one left. The timer read 51:06 when they got their last glimpse of it before entering their rooms.

 

“ _Whoa!_ ” shouted Mary-Jane as One shut the door behind them. “That’s a severed arm. Holy shit, that’s a fucking severed arm, right there. What the fuck. Holy shit.”

“It’s gotta be a fake,” said One, but his voice trembled and he did not move any closer to examine it.

The arm lay on a small folding table, disconnected just before the elbow. The color eventually persuaded them to approach; it was too pale, almost translucent. It felt like rubber under Mary-Jane’s curious fingers. “Think it’s fake, yeah,” she said. “Not that I know what severed arms are supposed to look and feel like or anything.”

“You didn’t have to clarify,” mumbled One.

An additional light flooded the room other than the harsh fluorescent bulb above when a projector switched on, flashing a short message.

 

**WELCOME TO THE FIRST HEX**

**The Dark Roman Four Gives the Key**

**50:45**

 

“So we do get a timer in here,” said K.

“Does it have to be so huge?” muttered Titanic. “And _red_. Why the hell does it have to be red?”

“We could accept the Hex if you don’t think you can concentrate,” K suggested.

Titanic scoffed. “You’re probably fucking calm enough for the both of us,” she said. “How are you so fucking calm? There’s a fucking countdown to our _deaths_ and a severed arm and—”

“It’s definitely fake,” K stated.

“—and a bottle of poison with a syringe in case we wanna fucking give up or something, and you look like it’s just another day.” Titanic crossed her arms and glared at K. “Really fishy how you knew all about this game before it even started.”

K’s lips twitched towards a pout. “It’s a video game, I told you,” she protested. “Everything here just… feels par for the course. It’s just… I guess it just doesn’t feel like real life. Like it hasn’t kicked in yet.”

“Reality check. There’s poison in your bracelet, and in fifty minutes, you’ll die.”

“It’s possible I’ll die sooner than that.”

Titanic slowly uncrossed her arms.

“Zero probably brought me here to tell everyone about the games this is based on,” K explained. “I think I’ve completed my purpose for the game. There’s nothing else I can offer, so it’d be reasonable for him to kill me off if he wants to generate conflict or something.”

Titanic turned to the table, to small vial of black liquid, to the needle, to the dummy arm. “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” she said, “but I think I’d rather work on this puzzle than listen to you anymore.”

 

“What happened between you two?”

Steak Sauce cracked a weak, strained smile. “We started dating a few years ago,” he said. “We were friends before that, both of us with, uh, Mary-Jane. We’d been dating about a year and a half when we had to break it off. Lots of hurt feelings on both sides. She’s the kind of person to hold a grudge, so… two years later, and she still hates my guts.”

Kitty nodded slowly.

“Doubt she’d go insane like this and set up a game to take revenge on me or something, though! No way she’s Zero,” he added. “She’s never really liked video games. Wouldn’t have the patience for puzzles, definitely.”

“Do you really think Zero is one of us?” asked Kitty.

His eyebrows flicked up as he put on a pleasantly surprised smile. “You don’t think so, either?” he realized. “Way I figure it, if Zero brought in someone who knows about the games, he’s gonna subvert little things so we think we’ve got all the pieces of the puzzle, but we really don’t. That’s why I keep saying Zero’s a ‘he’, even though there’s only one other ‘he’ with us and he’s too young to pull this off. I think Zero’s not here.”

“I see arguments for and against,” said Kitty. “At the end of the rules, he said he’s watching us, but he could be watching us either in person or through the cameras.”

Another black camera was set up in the corner of the ceiling of the Hex Rooms, gazing down on the barren space. The only place one could go to escape a camera lens was behind the divider that sectioned off the toilet from the rest of the bathroom.

“And I think the fact that it feels like an obvious piece of the game formula to subvert, might make it a target for reverse psychology,” she continued. “Maybe something else less obvious will be subverted, but Zero is still a part of the game.”

Steak Sauce’s surprised smile gave way to an impressed grin. “You’re a smart chick, aren’t you,” he said. “Shame it’s gotta be you who got amnesia. You’ve got a wipe on all your memories? Don’t remember _anything_?”

She shrugged. “I remember… _things_. Knowledge, I mean,” she explained. “Just not about myself. I… I just don’t have any sense of identity. I feel more like a walking encyclopedia than a person. An encyclopedia with a lot of pages ripped out.”

“This stuff’s always temporary, Kitty. We’ll win this game, get you out of here, and figure out how to get you help,” he promised. “You’ll be back to your old self soon.”

She gave a quivering smile, glancing at the rhinestones on the toes of her ballet flats. Her eyes drifted towards the projector on the wall, and she mumbled, “We should get back to solving that riddle.”

 

**WELCOME TO THE FIRST HEX**

**The Dark Roman Four Gives the Key**

**48:01**

 

“ _Four Gives_. Could that be forgives?” said One. “The dark Roman forgives the key. Forgives the key. Dark Roman.”

“Okay, dude, we’ve been slamming our heads against this pretty hard,” Mary-Jane decided. “Might be better if we leave it alone a second and come back to it.”

He groaned and turned away from the projection at the wall. His glare fell on the fake arm resting on the table, as well as the accompanying accessories.

“This vial’s dark, right?” he kept muttering. “So what’s the Roman part? Is the needle Roman? Is it just a decoy prop?”

“Dude, I said leave it alone,” Mary-Jane sighed. “Let’s talk about something else. What’s the order you put in for the bracelets?”

He folded his arms. “Aren’t I supposed to be the player who asks questions?” he grumbled.

“I’m serious. I wanna figure out what team has the bias,” she said. “Because I picked you second. I picked Kitty, you, then K. So if you had me ranked pretty high, then maybe your side’s got the bias.”

“Maybe Kitty just ranked you last on her end and you didn’t get matched,” he retorted under his breath.

“Why would Kitty rank me last?”

“Same reason you ranked K last, right? You gotta rank _somebody_ last.” He rolled his eyes. “And you were treating her like a child when she’s clearly some kind of genius, even if she’s got amnesia.”

Mary-Jane sighed and turned back to the riddle on the projector.

 

**WELCOME TO THE FIRST HEX**

**The Dark Roman Four Gives the Key**

**46:32**

 

“Wait, maybe…” Titanic took a step away from the wall to see the riddle over where K was tracing out anagrams from its letters. “Roman four could mean four in Roman numerals.”

“You mean, IV?” K asked, hands planted against the wall as she unscrambled the letters in her mind.

“Exactly!” Titanic shouted with a delighted grin. She swiped the needle from the table. “ _IV,_ K. The dark IV gives the key.”

“I thought you needed, like, a bag and tube for an IV,” K said with a frown. “Not just a needle.”

“That’s for an IV drip,” said Titanic. “IV just means intravenous. Into the veins. I’ll make an IV injection of this dark stuff into the arm with this needle, and that’ll get us closer to the key. God, I hate puzzles, but I fucking _love_ it when I solve them!”

K spun away the wall and almost crashed into the folding table in her excitement. “How do know how to do this?”

 

“Don’t ask me how I know how to do this,” said Steak Sauce, depressing the plunger at the end of the syringe to inject the black fluid into the dummy arm. “Let’s just say that I was a bit of an unscrupulous character back when I was in school. Not that I’d call myself scrupulous now, either.”

 

“I thought you knew how to do it!” Mary-Jane yelled.

“I told you, I know how to do IM injections, not IV!” One shouted back.

“But you just filled up that syringe like a fucking pro!”

“That’s—you fill the needle the same way no matter what kind of injection you’re doing!” He held out the needle, syringe flooded with black, with a shaking hand. “IM injections are easy, you just kind of jab near the thickest part of the muscle. It doesn’t take a genius. IV, you literally have to get the needle _inside_ the vein, don’t you?”

“So why do you think _I_ could do it?!” she shot back. “I’ve never held a needle in my goddamn life!”

“That’s a likely fucking story coming from someone whose friend nicknamed her _Mary-Jane_ ,” he retorted.

“The fuck?! You think because I smoke weed, that means I do fucking _heroin_ or some shit?!”

“Look, I’m not doing this. I’m _not_. I don’t wanna get blamed if I mess it up.” He slammed the syringe against the table next to the pale arm awaiting an injection. “Either you’re doing it, or we’re accepting the Hex.”

Mary-Jane took the needle with a sigh. “Yeah, worst comes to worst, we just take the Hex,” she said to steel herself.

The veins in the arm looked like pale hollows in the white, rubbery flesh. She jabbed the tip of the needle into the clearest one and pushed.

Black flooded through the network of blood vessels. When the needle was as empty as Mary-Jane could force it, she noticed a strange twist in veins about a centimeter beneath the surface of the arm.

“8523,” she said. “You think the password takes a PIN to get out?”

“Is it gonna kill us if we get it wrong?” One asked.

“I don’t think that was in the rules,” she responded with a shrug. “Not the Hex Room doors.”

He swallowed and headed to the keypad beside the door. “Eight, five, two, three,” he repeated as he punched in the numbers. “You’re sure that’s it?”

She lifted the arm up by the elbow-side. It wobbled uncertainly in the air as she said, “I’ll hit you.”

He grimaced as he pushed enter. The door made a satisfying click as the deadbolt came open again.

With chills running down her spine, Mary-Jane declared, “Let’s get the _fuck_ outta here,” as she scrambled for the door, dropping the dummy arm and shoving her way back into the hall.

“Hey, they’re out!” called Steak Sauce. “That’s everybody.”

The other four players were all gathered around the projector in the main area. Over their heads, the remaining time blinked down from 44:43.

“Come take a look,” said Steak Sauce with a beckoning wave. “Zero’s got a new message for us.”


	4. Turandot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did I publish two chapters in one day? Possibly. I don't actually remember. Everything is a blur. I love writing.

“So what’s the lowdown?” asked Mary-Jane.

“It’s literally three lines. Just read it yourself,” muttered Titanic. She stepped back from the wall to allow Mary-Jane and One a better view of the projection.

**SUPPLEMENTARY RULES**

> The password that unlocks the Number 6 Door is Zero’s true name. Ergo, the Hex Game will end when a confession is made. As a reminder, entering an incorrect password for the Number 6 Door will terminate the game, and therefore, your lives.
> 
> _Pena la morte, il nome dell’Ignoto sia rivelato prima del mattino._

**4:47 UNTIL SECOND HEX BEGINS**

“It’s three lines plus something in French or whatever,” said Mary-Jane.

“Are you an idiot? That’s not French,” Titanic retorted.

“Seriously? But _la morte_ is _death_ in French, isn’t it?”

Steak Sauce winced. “Oh, it fucking is, isn’t it,” he realized.

“I think it’s Italian,” said One. “It means death in Italian, too. And _del mattino_ , that’s _of the morning_ , I think. _Prima_ is _first_. First of the morning?”

“What’s Ig-noto?” asked K. “That one’s capitalized. It might be important.”

One stared at it, eyes gathering into a squint, as if he thought the text would translate itself if he looked at it hard enough. “ _Ignoto_ ,” he repeated, flipping the _gn_ in the proper Italian pronunciation. “ _Il nome dell’Ignoto. Il nome… il nome…_ Do I know _il nome_?”

“So we got ‘death first thing in the morning’ so far?” Steak Sauce sighed.

“ _Il nome suo nessun saprà,_ ” One recited, nodding to himself. His blue eyes buzzed around the room as he searched for more. “ _E… e… e noi dovrem… ahimè, morir!_ ”

It was the first time he had smiled the entire game, and it had a kind of lopsided look. His teeth were large and just a bit crooked, not bad enough to need braces, but not perfect, either.

“This is _Turandot_ ,” he stated. “This whole game is just _Turandot_.”

Silence met his declaration at first. Mary-Jane broke it after a second or two to say, “Okay, where do I start asking questions?”

His smile twitched down into his usual expressionless mask as he stammered through his explanation. “It’s… it’s an opera,” he began. “Puccini, I think. It’s mostly famous because Pavarotti did some big recordings of the aria _Nessun dorma_. None shall sleep. The whole thing is there’s this princess Turandot, and she challenges her suitors to answer her riddles for the chance to marry her. So this one prince from another country comes in and answers all the riddles, so she’s freaking out, and he gives her a chance to back out by giving her a challenge of his own. He says if she can figure out his name before dawn of the next day, he’ll put his life at her mercy. So she tells everyone in her city—I think she tells them that line there, up on the projector.”

> _Pena la morte, il nome dell’Ignoto sia rivelato prima del mattino._

“It’s something like, if you don’t find out the prince’s name—the prince, he’s the _Ignoto_ , I think—if you don’t find out his name before morning, you’ll be put to death. The whole city. That’s why they say _nessun dorma_ , none shall sleep. Until they find his name.” One dropped his hands to his sides and shrugged. “So Zero’s the prince. And we’re Turandot’s citizens.”

“Then who is Turandot?” asked Kitty.

One frowned. “Maybe Zero has some kind of partner? Or enemy. Or… kind of both, if we go by the opera.”

“Most important question. Does she find out his name?” Steak Sauce asked.

“He tells it to her. He puts his life in her hands,” One responded. “Like the message says. Game ends when a confession is made. It’s the only way we’ll get Zero’s name.”

“What _is_ the prince’s name in the play?” asked Mary-Jane. “Like, is it a trick like that? Just enter the prince’s name?”

Titanic shifted herself hastily between Mary-Jane and the exit. “You better be fucking a hundred percent sure before you _touch_ that keypad,” she snapped. “We _die_ if we get it wrong, remember?!”

“I don’t remember the prince’s name, anyway,” said One with a shrug.

“You knew a shit-ton, though,” said Steak Sauce, narrowing his eyes. “Pretty convenient.”

“It’s centered around the aria, like I said,” One said with yet another shrug. “You’d probably recognize it if you heard it. It’s a really big one for tenors, it’s got a big, high note at the end. Real victorious and shit. It’s the prince singing when the night’s almost over and he knows he’s won. He hears the townspeople say that line, _Il nome suo nessun saprà, e noi dovrem, ahimè, morir, morir_. No one knows his name, so we’re all going to die.”

They heard only the hum of the projector for a time.

“This is too convenient,” Steak Sauce insisted. “You just _happen_ to know all about this opera Zero’s referencing.”

“Like Kitty just happened to know about the algorithm that sorted us,” One replied. “And like K happened to know about the video games this is all based on. This is what the Q-Type players are for, isn’t it? We bring the knowledge and unravel the mystery.”

“I thought the A-Type players had the knowledge,” Titanic argued. “And you’re supposed to get our knowledge to unravel the mystery.”

“Did Zero mix us up?” wondered Mary-Jane.

“That would be a pretty glaring mistake,” K said. “We don't have much time. The Second Hex is about to start.”

“Fuck that for a goddamn second. We’re not splitting up yet,” Steak Sauce ordered, his face grim.

The secondary timer ticked down to zero and displayed the matches for the next round, but Steak Sauce didn’t spare the wall a glance.

“We’re ditching the codenames,” he declared. “Anybody who doesn’t agree is automatically suspected of being Zero. Capisce? We’ll start here. I’m Ian.”

“Selene,” said Titanic.

“Get it?” said Mary-Jane, grinning with glee. “Selene, like Celine Dion, so I thought _My Heart Will Go On_ , so I said—”

“She’s Chantal,” said Selene loudly.

There was a pause while the Q-Type players looked at each other uncertainly. “Um, I’m Lily,” said K quietly.

One looked to Kitty expectantly, as she was positioned next in the line, but then his eyes went wide. “Fuck, you don’t even know, do you?”

“This is such bullshit,” muttered Ian.

Kitty flinched. “Don’t you… didn’t you believe me?” she asked in a weak voice.

“Y’know, I fucking wanted to, until this bullshit came up,” he snapped, his lips peeling back into a grimace as he stared her down. “Amnesia’s pretty convenient when the password outta here is your _name_.”

“Stop, Zero’s never the amnesiac,” Lily protested. “It’s _real_.”

“Zero might not subvert the obvious thing, that they’re playing the game with us,” Ian snarled, “but they might subvert something else we weren’t expecting, _hmm_?”

Tears were welling up in Kitty’s eyes. Chantal and Lily moved closer to her as if ready to form a human barricade between her and Ian.

“Ian, fucking drop it,” Selene cut in. “She’s not gonna answer you, whether she’s lying about the amnesia or not. We’ve got some doors to go through before all our fucking time runs out because you won’t stop fucking yelling.”

She moved towards Kitty, not in her defense, but because of the assignments on the board.

**SECOND HEX**

**Q1, A1**

**Q2, A2**

**Q3, A3**

**Proceed to the unlocked Hex Rooms**

“Just hold on a fucking second,” Ian said. “ _Your_ name. You haven’t said it.”

One glanced nervously away from Ian’s stare to give the camera a wary look. He shrank under the pressure of everyone’s expectant eyes. “Why do I have to give my name if she doesn’t?” he mumbled.

“Are you _him_?” Ian demanded. “Are you Zero?!”

“ _No!_ What the fuck?!” One shouted, getting red in the face. “Just because I don’t wanna give my name to a bunch of strangers when I’m on camera in some kind of _murder_ house—”

“Get along, boys, you’re in a room together next round,” Chantal interjected. “It’s just your first name, bud. Just say it.”

He cringed. “Fine,” he said. His voice fell low, barely more than a whisper. “It’s… it’s Kyle.”

“Great! All settled! Let’s get into the next fucking rooms, pronto!” Selene yelled, already herding Kitty along with her. “Maybe this puzzle will have a human _leg_ or something!”

“I call the Virgo door!” Chantal hollered. “Cool with you, Lily?”

“We’re taking the farthest room,” Ian said firmly, marching towards the hall, eyes locked onto the door with the planetary symbol.

“Great, we’ll go in the snake room, I literally could not give a single shit,” Selene grumbled, shoving the door open.

“What’re you so worried about?” Chantal asked. “We’re making good time. Halfway through the game exactly.”

**WELCOME TO THE HEX GAME**

**33:01**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hooray you learned (almost) everyone's names!! And you got to see them all being Best Friends Forever. I'm sure they'll work it out with each other by the end of the game.


	5. Second Hex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> nothing like frantically writing fiction to take your mind off of the unexpected shitstorm going on tonight...... hope you can take your mind off of whatever might be bothering you whenever you might be reading this.....

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

Although Selene planted her feet after a single step inside the door, Kitty moved forward with caution and crouched down. The room was just as barren as the last, if not more. This time, it lacked even the lightweight folding table. The puzzle lay on the concrete, though perhaps  _lay_ was the wrong choice of word for the largest item.

The projector flicked on. Kitty glanced up. Selene was already staring at the back wall, waiting for the message, even if she could already guess what it would say.

 

**WELCOME TO THE SECOND HEX**

**The Password is Inside the Safe**

**32:49**

 

“Yeah, that... that’s not gonna happen.” Chantal laughed as she said it, a humorless, nervous laugh. “You, uh, wanna see what happens when we press the big red button?”

“L-let’s take a quick look around first,” said Lily, pressing one knee through her threadbare jeans to the concrete. “Maybe there’s a gimmick.”

She gently unlatched the toolbox and rummaged through its contents, only to find screwdrivers and wrenches, all cheap and lightweight. Having not noticed the steel plates and large bolts securing it to the floor, Chantal attempted to hoist the modest, black safe off of the ground. “Aw, fuck you, Zero,” she muttered, giving it a kick with the heel of her shoe.

“Probably so we don’t try to break down the door by throwing the safe at it, or something,” Lily guessed. “Like Selene wanted to try with the table last round, actually.”

“Hah, yeah, she’s crazy. Love her.” Chantal circled the safe and the toolbox slowly before squatting beside Lily and giving the materials a cold, hard look. “Any gimmicks?”

Lily’s hands trembled slightly as she replaced the tools and lifted her eyes to the timer telling them they had already wasted over a minute. “Okay,” she said. “Nobody else is going to be able to solve this, so we’re just holding people up if we don’t accept the Hex.”

“Can I push it?” Chantal asked, her smile gleaming in the fluorescent lights.

Lily shrugged. “Go ahead,” she mumbled.

She was pulling the sleeves of her hoodie past her fingertips, controlling her breaths, when the fluorescent bulb snapped out. The only light in the room came from the projection, which faded to a deep red, thus obscuring the game time printed in the same color.

“Whoa, okay.” Chantal’s heels clicked back from the door. “Looks like Zero’s a little drama queen.”

 

**YOU HAVE ACCEPTED THE HEX**

**UNKNOWN TIME REMAINING**

“The hell does that mean, unknown time remaining?” Selene demanded. “Where’s our clock? I fucking hate that clock, but I _want_ that clock.”

“I… I think this was part of the rules,” Kitty said, squeezing her eyes closed to shut out the red glow. “The way I read it, if only some of us accept the Hex, then it lets us out based on whenever the others solve the puzzle. So it’ll only show a timer once everyone accepts the Hex.”

“Fucking Chantal,” Selene accused immediately. “She probably thinks she can solve this somehow. She’s so stubborn.”

A wry smile flicked onto Kitty’s face as she likened the two women to a pot and a kettle. “It’s only been a couple of minutes,” she said. “Maybe they’re just… trying to be thorough.”

Selene sat herself down on the ground with a huff. “Well, you’re supposed to ask me questions now, right?” she muttered. “Got any questions?”

Kitty paused with a question on the tip of her tongue. She held it back and replaced it with an easier one to start. “How long have you known Chantal and Ian?”

“Since college. Almost a decade now.” She groaned. “ _Fuck_ , that makes me sound old.”

“Twenty-eight isn’t old,” Kitty said gently.

“How’d you know I was twenty-eight?”

“You said you were born in 1988. When you were talking about the Year of the Snake.”

Selene shifted her legs; she stretched one out in front of her while she held the other to her chest. “Wish I could ask you how old _you_ are,” she sighed. “That’s the biggest damn mystery on my mind. The whole riddle of the Hex Game or whatever. Whether you’re some kind of prodigy genius kid or a college student with severe baby face.”

“I… I feel like I might be an adult?” Kitty said uncertainly. “I feel older than, um… Kyle?”

“Yeah, you seem like you’re handling this whole thing better than him,” Selene said. “Poor kid’s a nervous wreck. Fucked up of Zero to put his essay on the door there and scribble all over it.”

Kitty was gathering the same impression of Selene from their conversation that she had been gathering throughout their time together. Selene was paying very close attention to the details of the Hex Game and committing everything to memory.

“Anything else you want to know?” she asked.

“Um, you don’t have to answer this, if you don’t want to,” said Kitty, “but… what happened between you and Ian?”

Selene gave a hearty groan. “He probably told you his side of the story last round, didn’t he?” she said. “He’s a piece of shit. You saw it before this round started up. He’s fine enough until you really get to know him, and then he just gets bent on showing you how much of a piece of shit he is. He’s…”

She trailed off. Her face, cast in red, turned towards the projector.

“Oh, fuck,” she realized. “Ian?”

 

Ian had laughed when he saw the prompt appear on the projector. “No fuckin’ way,” he had said, and if Kyle had not been standing right next to him to hear his tone, one would think he was echoing the sentiments of the teams in the other rooms. He was not bewildered; he was skeptical.

“It’s a decoy,” he explained to Kyle. “There’s probably nothing in this whole room can break that safe. Probably doesn’t even have the password written in it. But check this.” Ian grabbed the handle of the locked door and jostled it. “This is a different lock than last time, remember? Last time, the keypad was beside the door, and this time it’s on the doorknob. And I happen to know this is a shit lock. All I need to break this is a couple credit cards and an Exact-O knife. I’ve done it before to this exact kind of lock.”

“You’re wanna card the door?” Kyle asked. “Like, when you slip it through the—”

“There’s no electronically locked door in the world you can card anymore, buddy. That’s for doors inside your own house with little turning locks.” Ian tapped the slit for a key underneath the doorknob. “Most electronic locks you install yourself, they come with physical keys as a backup. Trouble is, these locks are so bad, I can pick ’em with lockpicks cut from a credit card. They’re shit.”

“Zero’s not gonna give you anything to cut a credit card,” Kyle protested. “Zero’s not gonna give you a credit card.”

“He’s _basically_ given me one of those things already, buddy,” Ian replied with a sneer.

“Why’d you make me say my name if you’re just gonna call me _buddy_ all the fucking time?”

Ignoring Kyle completely, Ian tore through the toolbox, dumping screwdrivers, wrenches, and pliers across the concrete with an awful clatter that made Kyle hold his hands over his ears and back into the farthest corner. When the toolbox was emptied with no sign of a sharp edge, not even wire cutters, nor a credit card, Ian rose up with a grimace and gave the plastic case a furious kick, only to find something lying flat beneath the toolbox all along.

“Look at this! What a joker.” Ian swiped the two Home Depot gift cards off of the ground. “We’re golden, Kyle. _Golden_.”

“I thought you said you needed a knife to—”

Ian cocked an eyebrow at him, wearing a devilish grin. He slipped a hand deep inside his pocket. He bounced the light from the ceiling into Kyle’s eye with the blade of his pocketknife.

“What the fuck?! What the _fuck_?!” Kyle screamed, slamming his hands against the walls behind him as if looking for somewhere farther to run. “Zero took all my shit! How come you got a fucking knife?!”

“Because I had too many fucking pockets,” replied Ian, slapping his hands against his cargo pants. “I keep this in a secret pocket. Hard to find unless you know it exists. Flat enough to get past a pat-down, I’ve been through enough to test it.”

“You had that this whole time and you didn’t fucking _tell_ us?!”

“Maybe I can tell everyone now, now that I’ve already done a great job making friends with all of you,” he sighed. He laid out the cards on the floor and made himself quite comfortable against the concrete, etching out the shapes with the tip of his knife. “I’ll get these made in about ten minutes, and I’ll get the lock picked in less than three.”

“Thirteen minutes.” Kyle’s chest was heaving still. “Wouldn’t it be faster to just do the Hex? The timer thing.”

“The Hex is supposed to take longer than it takes to solve the puzzle yourself if you know what you’re doing,” said Ian. “And I know what I’m doing. The Hex would probably be over twenty minutes, and you know we don’t have that kind of fucking time.”

Having nothing better to do, Kyle stared blankly at the seconds ticking by. He made a note of the time that Ian had started, scheduling his rage for thirteen minutes after that.

 

**WELCOME TO THE SECOND HEX**

**The Password is Inside the Safe**

**28:18**

 

“Alright, I know you’re supposed to be the one asking questions here or whatever, technically,” said Chantal, “but I got some questions I wanna ask you. I wanna make this a collaborative thing.”

“I don’t really know what else to ask, anyway,” said Lily.

“Okay, so earlier, you said I’m either a serial killer or a CIA agent, right? What’s up with that?”

Lily did not need to hide her red face; everything in the room was already cast in red from the projector. “Well, um,” she mumbled into hands, which were still covered by her sleeves. “This—the video games—they’re from Japan, okay, so… So there’s always a, um, fanservice character. Just, just an outrageously well-built woman wearing…  _way_ less than anyone else.”

“Outrageously well-built, huh?” Chantal repeated with a grin. “I’ll have to add that to my résumé. Can I list you as a reference?”

Lily jerked her knees to her chest and buried her flaming face in her jeans. “I’m—I’m just s-stating facts,” she stuttered. “I’m… I’m not blind.”

“And the outrageously well-built woman is usually some kind of grade-A badass or something?” Chantal asked. “Like, was she a  _cool_ serial killer, at least? Never got caught? Freaky MO?”

“All of the above, yeah,” Lily said. “I always thought it was a cool way to handle that kind of cultural need to fill that archetype. To subvert it and have her be a really strong character in some facet completely unrelated to her sexuality.”

“You sound like you read a lot,” Chantal guessed.

“Um, sort of,” Lily mumbled. “I… write a lot, too.”

“No kidding, really? What do you write?”

She hesitated. “Just… silly stuff. It’s not really…”

“I won’t laugh.”

With a sigh, Lily confessed, “I write fanfiction. I write a shit-ton of it for the video games this whole thing is based on. I’m, like, ninety-five percent sure that’s how Zero picked me for this stupid piece of shit Hex Game garbage.”

Chantal kept her promise to not laugh, but just barely. “So you’re literally, like, hardcore into these games?” she asked. “So you got the best idea out of any of us what’s going on, don’t you?”

“You all know about as much as I do. Well…” Lily shifted her sneakers. “I guess… I guess there’s two people I kind of suspect now.”

“Of being Zero?!”

“Maybe? Just… Kyle and Selene,” she said. “It’s… it’s kind of stupid. It doesn’t really make sense. But… their _names_. Especially Kyle, how he was so cautious about saying it.”

“What’s wrong with their names?” asked Chantal.

“There are two characters with names related to the moon in the game,” Lily said. “Tragic love interests, even. So it’s weird that her name is Selene.”

“Her name really is Selene,” Chantal said with a shrug. “I’ve known her for years. She’s always been Selene. So it’s not like this is something she coulda made up to match the game or something.”

“She could have picked the game to match her name,” said Lily.

Chantal mulled over the idea of Selene as Zero for no more than a moment before the thought fell cold and immobile. Selene was brusque and straightforward. Chantal could not conceive of a reason that Selene would construct such a convoluted event.

“Then there’s Kyle,” said Lily. “Kyle’s kind of a secret name in the series, I guess you could say. It’s not revealed until the end. It’s such a common name, though. I wouldn’t be suspecting him of anything if he hadn’t been so reluctant to say his name.”

“You think _he_ could be Zero?”

“It could be anything, really,” Lily said. “He could be working with Zero, and he thought maybe giving his name would give him away to me because I’d know that was a character in the games. He could honestly just be worried about saying his name on camera—he’s in high school, isn’t he? But I think he somehow knows that Kyle is a name from the games.”

“If he knew that, why not give a fake name?” asked Chantal. “Like, there’s no reason any of you Q-Types would have to say your real names, that’s what I’ve been thinking this whole time. I think Zero’s on your team, because they could say whatever name they want. Plus I know Ian and Selene well enough to think they wouldn’t pull a stunt like this.”

As she said it, she remembered the strange character taking over Ian’s eyes just before the Second Hex began. Though she was familiar with that side of him, she did not know it well. It could go deeper and darker than she knew.

“It’s possible Kyle and Kitty know each other,” Lily murmured. “Or maybe… _knew_ each other. He knows her. She doesn’t remember him, maybe.”

“ _Oh_ , but he doesn’t know whether or not she’s faking the whole amnesia shit, so he feels like he can’t give a fake name,” Chantal finished. “Oh, man, that makes so much sense. He knows about the game, and he knows Kitty.”

Lily shook her head thoughtfully. “That doesn’t make sense at all,” she said. “If that’s all true, why would he feel the need to hide that from us?”

“Because he’s Zero,” Chantal declared, eyes and smile wide.

“But if he’s Zero, he would _know_ whether Kitty’s amnesia is real or not,” Lily sighed. “So this is all just one big circle of ‘we don’t know anything still’.”

Chantal sighed, too. “But we gotta come up with an answer after this, don’t we? This is the last round of puzzles.”

“Nobody remembers playing the game before,” whispered Lily. “This isn’t the right timeline.”

“H-hey, you can’t give up yet.” Chantal reached for Lily’s shoulder, hesitating just before her hand touched the soft cotton of her hoodie. “We’ve got some ideas, right? Maybe the others found out some other stuff, and we’ll be able to put this shit together with—”

With a sudden buzz and a flicker, the fluorescent light came back to life. The door gave an audible click as it came unlocked. The projection faded from red to black, with a final message written in white.

**END OF SECOND HEX**

**12:06**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah I had lily talk about their names because there's no way she wouldn't pick up on that even if i'm just memeing. am i just memeing...? who knows. anyway, shit's gonna go down next chapter. it's the sixth chapter of course shit's gonna go down :)


	6. Game Over

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's chapter 6. Have fun, kiddos.

“Hey, you made it!”

Ian was back to his easy smile. He stood in the center of the main chamber with his hands in the deep pockets of his cargo pants, back casually hunched, bony hips tilted forward. He and Kyle had been the first to exit their Hex Room.

“How’d you guys do?” he asked.

“Took the Hex,” Chantal said, rolling her eyes. “Man, _fuck_ that room. You guys have the same thing, with the safe and shit?”

“Yeah,” said Kyle quietly. He was pale, or perhaps that was just from the glow of the projection he was watching with hopeless eyes.

**END OF SECOND HEX**

**11:28**

“Aren’t we supposed to get another clue?” Lily asked. “There was one after the First Hex.”

“Only after everyone finished,” said Ian. “We’re still waiting on Selene and the amnesiac. Meantime, I wanted to take a crack at some of the clues we haven’t figured out yet.”

He kept his hands in his pockets as he took long, casual strides towards Chantal and Lily. Without meeting their eyes, he slipped between them into the hallway leading to the Hex Rooms.

“Lily, you said this was a planetary symbol, right?” he said. “Is it Saturn?”

Lily ran her eyes over the h-shaped insignia and shrugged. “It could be,” she mumbled.

“I’m betting it is. Sixth planet from the sun.” He tapped on the Virgo symbol. “Chantal, you happen to know if this is the sixth sign in the zodiac?”

“The zodiac is a cycle,” said Lily.

“Nah, but they always start with Aries in the horoscope,” Chantal said. She turned her eyes towards the ceiling and counted on manicured fingers, the nails long and burgundy. “Aries, Taurus, Gemini… Cancer, Leo… yeah, I think Virgo’s next. Six.”

“Three guesses what number in the Chinese zodiac the snake is,” said Ian, pointing at the s-shaped serpent.

“Six, six, six. Sign of the devil,” Chantal joked.

“Not the devil, actually. The Beast of Revelations.” The toes of Ian’s long, ratty tennis shoes lifted up and he turned around on his heels. “Which might actually be our beautiful friend over here.”

Hanging from the door now in front of him was the grotesque painting of the many-headed creatures, one on land, and one rising from the sea.

“The scripture talks about two beasts, actually. Not something you’d know unless you grew up with an overly religious Greek Orthodox grandmother as she developed dementia,” Ian continued. “So that’s these boys. You _could_ think of it as another six, but I’m willing to bet it’s another clue.”

“Wait, but if it’s a six, that makes this row work, too,” said Lily, pointing at the marked-up exam. “Zero put an F on it because F is the sixth letter of the alphabet. And—Chantal, like you said—if we call that blueish color indigo, then that’s the sixth color of the rainbow.”

“Another six-six-six,” mumbled Kyle. “One for each beast.”

“Or, it could be a reinterpretation of the Number of the Beast, which I find much more interesting,” said Ian, narrowing his eyes. “Depending on what texts you read, I think, you get a different number. It’s either 666 or 616. Very curious, when you consider what’s in the center of this row.”

Kyle’s unfairly graded essay hung from the door, the red F circled twice.

“Zero knew Kyle was going to pick the codename One,” said Ian. “Or, Zero _told_ you to pick the codename One.”

Kyle’s droopy eyes went wide. He leaned his weight away from all of the faces turning towards him. “N-no,” he stuttered. “No way, I… I just…”

In the thick of the silence that followed his denial, a lock clicked beside them. Ian stepped away from the snake door and towards Kyle, who staggered back on uncoordinated legs.

“I-it’s a coincidence,” he protested, looking over his shoulder to see how much more room he had to run. “Or Zero knew, I don’t know—I didn’t mean it like that, it was just—my bracelet was—my _bracelet_!”

He flung out his arm desperately, pointing at the Q1 printed on its face.

“Zero gave me bracelet one! He _made_ me pick One!”

“I’ve got a bracelet with a one, too,” responded Ian. “But I didn’t make it my codename.”

“Yeah, but you’re a Virgo, anyway, you motherfucker.”

Two small arms slid around Ian’s hips from behind, hands clasping in front of his belt buckle. He flipped over so fast that Kyle blinked at the flash of feet in his feet and missed the whole thing. The sound of a skull slamming into concrete made everyone in the room wince.

In the midst of her backbend, Selene shoved Ian’s limp, dangling legs backwards so that his unconscious body could completely clatter to the ground in an awkward, gangling heap. She grunted as she swung herself upright to her deceptively small height, death and tears in her eyes.

Kitty stood frozen in the entrance to the Hex Room hallway, shuddering as she held her hands over her mouth and silently wept. Kyle scrambled the rest of the way back into the corner Ian had been leading him to, pressing both hands against the wall. Ian’s jaw lay askew as his unseeing eyes fluttered shut.

“Selene, what the fuck?!” yelled Chantal.

“I need some rope or something!” she shouted in a choked voice, whipping her head around to survey the room full of people backing away from her. “He’s not gonna stay out for long!”

“Why did you knock him out in the first place?!” Chantal demanded. “What the hell is going on?!”

“Why would you _do_ this?!” Lily wailed, clutching her dry, discolored hair in her fists. “We were supposed to be _allies_! We need to work together to get out of here!”

“Shut _up_! Shut the _fuck_ up!” Tears streamed down Selene’s face. “You know _exactly_ what’s going on, Chantal! If the three of us are supposed to be the ones with the answers, there’s only one thing this fucking game is about!”

The Q-Type players turned to Chantal, hoping to see confusion, even denial, but Chantal had pressed her full lips into a quivering line, returning a hard, pained stare to Selene. As it was with her video games, there was no clear line between ally and enemy.

Meanwhile, their precious little time dwindled away.

**END OF SECOND HEX**

**6:20**

“He didn’t,” uttered Chantal. “Ian, he… he didn’t… did he…?”

Selene staggered from his unconscious body as if she were falling apart. Her arms were limp at her sides, jerking with every uncoordinated stomp of her jellylike legs. Her hands hit her face hard when she tried to scrape the tears from her eyes and cheeks.

“It was _us_ , Chantal!” she screamed. “They didn’t pick Bryan, they didn’t pick Lucy, they picked _us_! Why the fuck else would they pick just _us_?!”

“But we had nothing to do with it!” Chantal yelled, throwing out her hands to her sides. “He wasn’t—we didn’t—!”

The lights flicked out. The projector faded to red, bathing the chamber in the color of blood.

**SIX MINUTES REMAIN**

**MAKE THEM CONFESS**

**5:58**

“ _Fuck you!_ ” Selene shrieked at the wall. “Fuck _you_ , fuck this _fucking game_ , fuck _everything!_ ”

“Seriously?!” Kyle moaned. “That’s all we fucking get, ‘make them confess’?!”

“Six minutes. Holy shit. Holy shit.” Chantal stared at her bracelet. “Six fucking minutes. Oh my _God_.”

Holding her hands over her face, Kitty fell against the wall beside her and slid to the ground, shaking with sobs.

“Who is Zero?!”

Lily stamped her foot as she screamed it, widening her stance as she glared around the room.

“Just—just fucking say it, okay?! There’s no espers and we don’t know what the fuck we were supposed to do here! Game fucking over!” she declared. “Fuck, this _isn’t_ a game! This is _real_! We are _all_ going to _fucking die_ if you don’t say something right _now_! This reality is gonna go on and we’re all gonna be _dead_ and there’s gonna be no answers for any of it anyway!”

Glances bounced around the room, but they heard nothing but the ring of Lily’s cry.

“Please, I _know_ it’s about multiple universes.” Her lips spread into the grimace one makes right before beginning to cry. “I know we didn’t play the game right, I get it. But if you don’t help us escape right now… we’re all going to die _._ ”

Chantal looked for Ian. He was supposed to say the next line after Lily. He would say something about how Zero would not put poison in their own bracelet. Then he would take out his knife.

But he was on the ground, unconscious, of course.

“Oh my God,” Chantal realized. Her speech came out muffled by the hands she unconsciously brought to her mouth. “ _I’m_ the esper.”

Kyle whipped around towards her with a crazed look in his eyes. “Wait, what the _fuck_?!”

“I fucking remember this!” Chantal cried. “Lily said the exact same thing, but nobody knocked out Ian, and he went fucking _nuts_ on us—Selene, you remembered, too, didn’t you?”

Selene remained slack-jawed and uncharacteristically silent.

“Am I the only one who remembers this?” Chantal asked.

“Tell us _everything_ you know!” Lily commanded. “Do you know who Zero is?! Do you know how we can stop this?!”

_Ian darted forward without warning, holding his knife out in front of him. He went after the easiest target first, the tiny girl with the thick, dark hair in a long braid. She shrieked and moved her feet faster than she could control towards the bathroom, her only escape from the chamber._

Chantal squeezed her eyes shut. “Wasn’t there something?” she muttered to herself. “There was something after that, there was…”

_“Alright, fuck this game,” said a voice from beside the Number 6 Door._

_The keypad stuck out a full inch from the wall. With the push of a plastic latch underneath it, the keyboard came loose. Underneath was a round, red button like those inside the Hex Rooms._

“We can stop this,” Chantal stated. “There’s… there’s a secret button.”

“A secret button?!” Lily repeated, whipping her head around. “Where?!”

A deep groan bounced off of the concrete floor and hit their ears.

“ _Shit!_ Guys, he’s got a knife!” warned Kyle in a high, breaking voice. “It’s in one of his pockets, I didn’t see where he put it, but he—that’s how we got out of the room, he used it to—!”

Chantal sprinted right past Ian as he picked himself off of the ground. She locked onto the keypad by the Number 6 Door.

“Don’t move, shithead, you’ve got a concussion,” said Selene.

“Who the _fuck_ did this?!” he roared.

Chantal nearly ripped the outer panel off of the keypad. Just as she had foreseen, a red button lay in wait underneath. Painted on the plastic was the word _RESET_.

“Fuck this game!” Chantal yelled, punching the button with all her might.

It was a strange feeling, being reminded of the needles in her wrist. The poison was just a little cooler than the temperature of her blood when it seeped into her veins, having been kept relatively warm inside the bracelet pressed against her skin.

“ _Fuck!_ ” Ian screamed, gripping his left forearm like a hopeless tourniquet. “You _fucking idiot_! What the _fuck_?!”

Lily collapsed, not from the poison, but from grief. She let the tears roll down her cheeks as she gave into sobs.

“What do we do?!” Kyle demanded, his voice rising and cracking and breaking. “What the fuck do we do?!”

“We fucking _die_!” Selene yelled. “Nice fucking _work_ , esper!”

Chantal took a step forward, but a wave of something between weakness and nausea rippled through her body as she tried to move, starting where her foot hit the ground and running up to her head, where it settled into a fog.

“But that’s what happened last time!” she protested. Even her voice sounded weaker. Her blurry vision did not clear after a blink. “We… I was…”

“Did we fucking _die_ last time, too?!” Selene snapped. “And your bullshit psychic powers saved your own skin?! F-fuck—”

Selene staggered and fell to one knee. Ian, already woozy from whatever head injury he had sustained, planted his hands on the floor and struggled to keep himself that elevated. Kyle sank against the far wall, his breathing fast and shallow, his eyes losing focus. Neither Lily nor Kitty would ever rise from where they lay crying.

_“Try again next timeline, shitheads.”_

That was what Zero had said in that previous Hex Game. They preemptively killed all of the players with a push of a button. There was a black hole, an empty space where Zero was standing in Chantal’s memory. It was the only thing she could not remember from that moment.

The poison was nauseating, but it was not painful. Chantal closed her eyes and let herself pass in relative peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hooray!! Everyone's dead.
> 
> I feel like leading up to this moment, when I've got the number of chapters already predetermined, is like playing Tales of Symphonia for the first time and getting closer to the Tower of Salvation thinking, "alright, there's a second disk to this game, so what kind of nonsense is going to happen" and then the nonsense happens and you're like "whoa nelly!!! that was a lot of nonsense, what the heckie" because you're in fifth grade and you don't swear because you're a good boy. What was I saying?
> 
> Next chapter is going to be cryptic at best and most likely unreadable, but I'm very excited to finally complete it. I've been working on pieces of it since last weekend.


	7. Esper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can probably never edit this chapter again because the formatting was so finnicky and gets ruined as soon as I submit it. And here I was thinking this would be a good way to pad my word count.
> 
> Are you ready for hints out the goddamn wazoo????

A young woman woke up in a dark hallway. She did not know this place, but her mind was foggy, and behind the fog was emptiness, so she did not think much of it. She could not think much at all.

Soon she forgot when she woke up. It could have been five minutes ago or fifty. She spent that time in the strange trance of being lost in thought without thinking. Perhaps she fell back to sleep during that period. It could have been five hours ago.

The hallway had a sharp right angle, of which she lay in the vertex and cast her eyes down both ends to see the three doors. At the end of each wing was a door sitting on the inner wall. The third door, which sat just beside her, had a window, a blinding point of brightness that cast a fuzzy, white rectangle across the floor. Her feet came into the edge of that patch of light. She smiled at her shoes. What cute shoes.

When she finally thought about standing, she was slow to rise. Her body wobbled, numb and nauseous. Her hand looked so small when she reached for the door. She pushed with her weak and tiny might, but the doorknob would not turn.

The light from the door pointed down the wing heading leftwards. The other wing was darker. She took an uncertain step towards the illuminated path, but her stomach curled up. Her legs began to shake. She lowered herself to the ground, breathing heavily.

She did not remember how long it took her to make it to the next door, nor how she made it there, nor why she chose the door cast in darkness. It was like waking up anew, her mind blank all over again, when she felt the cool metal of the doorknob giving way under her palm.

The only light in the cramped room behind the door came from a computer screen, and even that showed mostly black with light grey text. As she shuffled towards the dim beacon, her toe collided with something lightweight that made a swishing noise as it shifted across the concrete floor. A cardboard box came to about the height of her knee when the stiff top flaps hung open in the air. She folded the flaps back against the sides of the box as she nudged it closer to the light of the computer.

Two known, yet unfamiliar, concepts came to her as she peered inside the box. She saw the cardboard inserts making separations between the contents and thought, _wine case_. She saw the collection of personal affects—wallets, cellphones, handbags—and thought, _lost and found_. Those concepts did not settle comfortably in her psyche. Wine cases were divided to fit twelve bottles, but the cardboard insert had been ripped up to merge twelve sections into six. A lost and found should have no method to separate personal items into sections.

Even the computer was not quite right. Under the dim monitor, it had no keyboard, only a mouse. She grabbed hold of it and wiggled as if trying to wake the computer into a brighter state, but the background remained black. The scroll wheel brought the massive amounts of text sliding up and down the dark screen. Her eyes glazed over it.

`import itertools   
import random   
import smphelpers   
    
class Player:   
    
    def __init__(self, id_in):   
        self.id = id_in   
        self.prefs = list()   
        self.match = None   
    
    def propose(self, reviewer):   
        if reviewer.match == None:   
            reviewer.match = self   
            self.match = reviewer   
            return True, None   
        elif reviewer.prefers(self):   
            loser = reviewer.match   
            reviewer.match.match = None   
            reviewer.match = self   
            self.match = reviewer   
            return True, loser   
        else:   
            return False, None   
              
    def prefers(self, suitor):   
        try:   
            return get_idx(self.prefs, self.match) > get_idx(self.prefs, suitor)   
        except ValueError:   
            return False   
      
    def __repr__(self):   
        return self.id   
      
    def copy(self):   
        player_copy = Player(self.id)   
        player_copy.prefs = self.prefs.copy()   
        player_copy.match = self.match   
        return player_copy   
          
    
    
class GameOption:   
    
    def __init__(self, prefs, pct=0.0, qsuits=True, round1=None, round2=None):   
        self.prefs = prefs   
        self.pct_matched = pct   
        self.qsuits = qsuits   
        self.round1 = round1   
        self.round2 = round2   
    
    
def get_idx(lst, itm):   
    for i in range(len(lst)):   
        if lst[i] == itm:   
            return i   
    raise ValueError   
    
    
def deep_copy(player_list):   
    new_list = list()   
    for player in player_list:   
        new_list.append(player.copy())   
    return new_list   
    
    
def remap_prefs(qnew, anew):   
    for new_player in qnew:   
        for i in range(len(new_player.prefs)):   
            new_player.prefs[i] = smphelpers.get_player_by_id(anew, new_player.prefs[i].id)   
    for new_player in anew:   
        for i in range(len(new_player.prefs)):   
            new_player.prefs[i] = smphelpers.get_player_by_id(qnew, new_player.prefs[i].id)   
    
    
def create_second_hex_lists(qlist, alist):   
    acopy = deep_copy(alist)   
    for a in acopy:   
        a.prefs.remove(a.match)   
        a.match = None   
    qcopy = deep_copy(qlist)   
    for q in qcopy:   
        q.prefs.remove(q.match)   
        q.match = None   
    remap_prefs(qcopy, acopy)   
    return qcopy, acopy   
    
    
def reset(player_list):   
    for player in player_list:   
        player.match = None   
    
    
def get_reqs():   
    reqstr1 = input("Enter first hex requirements: ")   
    reqstr2 = input("Enter second hex requirements: ")   
    first_rex = reqstr1.split(",")   
    second_rex = reqstr2.split(",")   
    return first_rex, second_rex   
    
    
def get_pct_matched(matches1, matches2, first_rex, second_rex):   
    total_reqs = 0   
    sum_matches = 0   
    if first_rex != ['']:   
        total_reqs += len(first_rex)   
        for match in matches1:   
           for req in first_rex:   
               if match[0].id + match[1].id == req or match[1].id + match[0].id == req:   
                   sum_matches += 1   
    if second_rex != ['']:   
        total_reqs += len(second_rex)   
        for match in matches2:   
           for req in second_rex:   
               if match[0].id + match[1].id == req or match[1].id + match[0].id == req:   
                   sum_matches += 1   
                     
    try:   
        return float(sum_matches/total_reqs)   
    except ZeroDivisionError:   
        return 0.0   
    
    
def create_players():   
    q1 = Player("Q1")   
    q2 = Player("Q2")   
    q3 = Player("Q3")   
    a1 = Player("A1")   
    a2 = Player("A2")   
    a3 = Player("A3")   
    qlist = [q1, q2, q3]   
    alist = [a1, a2, a3]   
    return qlist, alist   
    
    
def gale_shapley_mukherji(suitors, reviewers):   
    matched = list()   
    unmatched = suitors.copy()   
    while len(unmatched) > 0:   
        suitor = unmatched.pop()   
        for reviewer in suitor.prefs:   
            success, loser = suitor.propose(reviewer)   
            if success:   
                matched.append(suitor)   
                if loser != None:   
                    unmatched.append(loser)   
                    matched.remove(loser)   
                break   
    if len(matched) == 3:   
        matches = list()   
        for m in matched:   
            matches.append((m, m.match))   
        return True, matches   
    else:   
        return False, None   
    
    
def game_logic(suitors, reviewers):   
    success1, matches1 = gale_shapley_mukherji(suitors, reviewers)   
    suitors2, reviewers2 = create_second_hex_lists(suitors, reviewers)   
    success2, matches2 = gale_shapley_mukherji(suitors2, reviewers2)   
    if not success2:   
        print("FAILED")   
        return matches1, None   
    return matches1, matches2   
    
    
def hex_game():   
    qlist, alist = create_players()   
    first_rex, second_rex = get_reqs()   
    smphelpers.get_preferences(qlist, alist)   
    zero = smphelpers.get_player_by_id(qlist, smphelpers.zero_id)   
    orig_game = GameOption(zero.prefs)   
    best_match = GameOption(zero.prefs)   
    for prefs in itertools.permutations(alist):   
        zero.prefs = list(prefs)           
    
        reset(qlist)   
        reset(alist)   
        matches1, matches2 = game_logic(alist, qlist)   
        if matches2 != None:   
            pct_matched = get_pct_matched(matches1, matches2, first_rex, second_rex)   
            if pct_matched >= best_match.pct_matched:   
                best_match = GameOption(zero.prefs, pct_matched, False, matches1, matches2)   
            print("asuits", prefs, pct_matched)   
        elif best_match.prefs == zero.prefs:   
            best_match.pct_matched = -1.0   
    
        reset(qlist)   
        reset(alist)   
        matches1, matches2 = game_logic(qlist, alist)   
        if matches2 != None:   
            pct_matched = get_pct_matched(matches1, matches2, first_rex, second_rex)   
            if pct_matched >= best_match.pct_matched:   
                best_match = GameOption(zero.prefs, pct_matched, True, matches1, matches2)   
            if zero.prefs == orig_game.prefs:   
                orig_game = GameOption(zero.prefs, pct_matched, True, matches1, matches2)   
            print("qsuits", prefs, pct_matched)   
        elif orig_game.prefs == zero.prefs:   
            orig_game.pct_matched = -1.0   
         
    if orig_game.pct_matched >= best_match.pct_matched:   
        best_match = orig_game   
      
    print("best game option:", best_match.prefs, "(", best_match.pct_matched, ")")   
    if best_match.qsuits:   
        print("qsuits")   
    else:   
        print("asuits")   
    print("first hex:", best_match.round1)   
    print("second hex:", best_match.round2)   
    zero.prefs = best_match.prefs   
    
    
def main():   
    hex_game()   
    
    
# i forget this every fcukign time   
if __name__ == "__main__":   
    main() `

She had a vague feeling of knowing that this was code, but she understood it. It read like English to her. It was designed to read like English as much as possible.

She did not know how she knew that. She did not even think to question it.

She knew not to read it from top to bottom. She started at the bottom and moved up.

` def main():   
    hex_game()   
    
    
# i forget this every fcukign time   
if __name__ == "__main__":   
    main() `

When a word was followed by a set of parentheses, it denoted a function. The def was short for _define_. Everything that followed that function definition was the set of lines that would occur when that function name was written in text. At the bottom of the program was a call to the function called `main()`. Whoever had written it was used to the programming convention that automatically calls functions named _main_ when a program is run, by the look of their comment. Python required the programmer to call _main_ explicitly. Python also ignored any text that came after a pound sign, though the programmer seemed to have underused this commenting utility.

Python. That was the name of this language.

By following functions from their call to their definition, she pieced together the meaning of this program as best she could.

`def hex_game():   
    qlist, alist = create_players()`

  
 

The equals sign means something more like _assignment_ in a programming context. On the right side of the equation, the programmer would write values, or code that would generate values, in this case. On the left side, the programmer gives a name to these values.

` def create_players():   
    q1 = Player("Q1")   
    q2 = Player("Q2")   
    q3 = Player("Q3")   
    a1 = Player("A1")   
    a2 = Player("A2")   
    a3 = Player("A3")   
    qlist = [q1, q2, q3]   
    alist = [a1, a2, a3]   
    return qlist, alist `

The brackets grouped together items in a list. The return statement indicated what values would be created by this function. So, back in the original line that made the function call, the values stored in the variables `qlist` and `alist` were those lists created inside of the function `create_players()`.

But what was a `Player?`

She scrolled far up to find the class. Naming conventions told her it was a class, not a function, though it had parentheses after it. A function should start with a lowercase letter, while a class starts with an uppercase letter.

` class Player:   
    
    def __init__(self, id_in):   
        self.id = id_in   
        self.prefs = list()   
        self.match = None `

The `__init__` was short for _initialization_. The rest was a bit more complicated. A class defines a type of data that a variable name can hold onto, instead of using only numbers and text and lists of such data. A `Player` was an object that had an ID, some kind of list, and a yet-unknown item.

It was hard for a human to keep all of this information in mind. It was a computer’s job to decipher this. Comments in the code would have helped her to understand, but the author seemed content to leave no messages to explain what was going on. She ignored the finer details of the new class of data and read on through the thread of occurrence as it would occur in the machine.

`    first_rex, second_rex = get_reqs()`

This led to:

` def get_reqs():   
    reqstr1 = input("Enter first hex requirements: ")   
    reqstr2 = input("Enter second hex requirements: ")   
    first_rex = reqstr1.split(",")   
    second_rex = reqstr2.split(",")   
    return first_rex, second_rex `

The function accepted input from the person who ran the program, processed the data, and returned it to the variables waiting for the function call to finish. Even if the words held no meaning, it was comforting, calming to follow this trail of function calls and data passing. It felt like home.

`     smphelpers.get_preferences(qlist, alist)   
    zero = smphelpers.get_player_by_id(qlist, smphelpers.zero_id) `

She looked for the origin of `smphelpers`, but it came from the very top of the program in the line `import smphelpers`. An import statement told the computer to look inside another file full of code for functions to use. The functions `get_preferences()` and `get_player_by_id()` were hidden away in another file, as was the value `zero_id`. She could guess the purpose of the latter function, by the values passed to it and its informative name, that it would return the `Player` object that matched the given ID. One in `qlist` was evidently called `zero`.

_“Are you Zero?!” the woman screamed._

Her mind faded again. She stared blankly at the screen as the light text turned into a grey blur under her eyes.

She found herself reading some time later, but she was no longer following the path from function to function like a computer would interpret the program. She was just blindly reading.

`def gale_shapley_mukherji(suitors, reviewers):`

She found her lips sliding towards a smile. The look of those words, the sound of them as she heard them in her head while she read, sparked a small burst of happiness, so quick she could not quite remember why she had felt it unless she walked back along the winding tracks of her train of thought. Gale and Shapley, those were like friends. Suitors and reviewers were words that resonated with her. They felt familiar on her lips and tongue when she mouthed them to herself.

Mukherji was also familiar, she decided, but it did not seem to fit with the other pieces.

`     matched = list()   
    unmatched = suitors.copy()   
    while len(unmatched) > 0:   
        suitor = unmatched.pop()   
        for reviewer in suitor.prefs:   
            success, loser = suitor.propose(reviewer)   
            if success:   
                matched.append(suitor)   
                if loser != None:   
                    unmatched.append(loser)   
                    matched.remove(loser)   
                break   
    if len(matched) == 3:   
        matches = list()   
        for m in matched:   
            matches.append((m, m.match))   
        return True, matches   
    else:   
        return False, None `

She followed the logic while barely seeing the words. The suitors started out without matches. One by one, they proposed to their preferred matches in order of their preferences until a reviewer accepted, and then it was the next suitor’s turn. The reviewer would accept if they were yet unmatched, or if they preferred the current suitor to the one they had already matched with. That abandoned suitor, affectionately referred to as a `loser` in this implementation of the algorithm, would return to the list of unmatched suitors and have to try their luck again at finding a match to accept them.

What surprised her was that there seemed to be a condition for failure. This algorithm was supposed to work every time, she knew. Another unfamiliar known.

` def game_logic(suitors, reviewers):   
    success1, matches1 = gale_shapley_mukherji(suitors, reviewers)   
    suitors2, reviewers2 = create_second_hex_lists(suitors, reviewers)   
    success2, matches2 = gale_shapley_mukherji(suitors2, reviewers2)   
    if not success2:   
        print("FAILED")   
        return matches1, None   
    return matches1, matches2 `

Her heart swelled. The algorithm was performed twice in a row. She wanted it to be a comparison of the matchings created when the suitors and reviewers were swapped, but unless the `create_second_hex_lists()` function flipped their values when the lists were returned, that was not likely. The fail condition nagged at her. Perhaps the suitors and reviewers were expected to pick their top two matches. She wondered if that could cause the algorithm to fail the second time.

She scrolled back to the long `hex_game()` and picked up where she left off.

`     for prefs in itertools.permutations(alist):   
        zero.prefs = list(prefs) `

This intrigued her. The player pulled out of their list and called `zero` was being assigned all possible orderings of the players in their preference list, one permutation at a time, before executing the following code.

`         reset(qlist)   
        reset(alist)   
        matches1, matches2 = game_logic(alist, qlist)   
        if matches2 != None:   
            pct_matched = get_pct_matched(matches1, matches2, first_rex, second_rex)   
            if pct_matched >= best_match.pct_matched:   
                best_match = GameOption(zero.prefs, pct_matched, False, matches1, matches2)   
            print("asuits", prefs, pct_matched)   
        elif best_match.prefs == zero.prefs:   
            best_match.pct_matched = -1.0   
    
        reset(qlist)   
        reset(alist)   
        matches1, matches2 = game_logic(qlist, alist)   
        if matches2 != None:   
            pct_matched = get_pct_matched(matches1, matches2, first_rex, second_rex)   
            if pct_matched >= best_match.pct_matched:   
                best_match = GameOption(zero.prefs, pct_matched, True, matches1, matches2)   
            if zero.prefs == orig_game.prefs:   
                orig_game = GameOption(zero.prefs, pct_matched, True, matches1, matches2)   
            print("qsuits", prefs, pct_matched)   
        elif orig_game.prefs == zero.prefs:   
            orig_game.pct_matched = -1.0 `

She thought the code was repeated twice in a row—a poor practice for a programmer in general, and especially strange when it would rewrite the values of the variables—until she noticed the small, important difference. In the first call to `game_logic()`, `alist` preceded `qlist` in the parameters. In the second, the opposite was true. `game_logic()` renamed these variables, when they were passed in as parameters, to `suitors` and `reviewers`. The scenario was attempted twice, once with `alist` as the suitors, and once with `qlist` as the suitors.

After this, there was a mess of conditionals that she could not parse without appropriate commenting, without better lighting and a bigger font, without all of her mind present. As best as she could tell, the loop was running a modified accumulator pattern, where it searched through every possibility to determine the `best_match`, which was an object of a class called `GameOption`, of which she was too tired to find the definition. It was based on some relationship between the matches determined by the algorithm and the requirements entered by the program user earlier.

` if orig_game.pct_matched >= best_match.pct_matched:   
        best_match = orig_game   
      
    print("best game option:", best_match.prefs, "(", best_match.pct_matched, ")")   
    if best_match.qsuits:   
        print("qsuits")   
    else:   
        print("asuits")   
    print("first hex:", best_match.round1)   
    print("second hex:", best_match.round2)   
    zero.prefs = best_match.prefs `

The program found the best match and outputted it to the console for the user to read. And then she was back at the start, where `main()` called `hex_game()`. The program had some kind of niche purpose that she, as an outsider, could not fully intuit, even though she understood the language.

She folded her knees underneath her to sit on the floor beside the wine case of personal belongings. With a slow, curious hand, she sifted through the things, letting texture be her guide in the dim room. Her fingers slid over a smooth rectangle of leather, running along its edges and corners with intrigue before she pulled out the slim wallet. Curiosity compelled to slide a finger inside and flip it open.

She held the wallet close to the little light she could gather from the computer screen so that she could make out the name and photo on the ID card inside. The plastic screen reflected the screen’s light and blocked out her view of the ID. She slipped her thin fingers into the slot and pulled out the four cards within.

They were all legal ID cards. Two were driver’s licenses from New York, one was from Texas, and the fourth had foreign writing on it. She recognized but could not parse the Greek alphabet. The names she could read were Ian Jones and Felix Ioannides from New York, and Ian Dragoumis from Texas. The two Ians had the same photo, while Felix had the same black-and-white picture as the Greek card. They were all of the same man, easily smiling. The cards all felt solid in her hands, like real IDs, save for the one from Greece, but that was one of the four that she was willing to reconcile with another from the United States pointing to this man being a dual citizen.

She shoved the cards back into the ID slot and dropped the wallet back into its compartment of the wine case. She peered inside at all of the items again. With a snap of her hand, she grabbed another wallet to sift through.

This woman had two IDs in her wallet, as well, but one was from Pennsylvania—not a driver’s license, she noticed—and one was from a college she had never heard of. Perhaps she had heard of it, but she did not remember it, she thought. Both IDs named Sarah Anderson, a girl with chubby cheeks and chin-length brown hair in a state of slight disarray.

A black, patent-leather handbag caught her attention next. The gold zipper unfolded the slim purse to expose a smartphone tucked between pockets for money, change, cards, and an ID. This woman, Selene Richards-Wu, kept only one card, her Massachusetts driver’s license. She had a smart, confident look to her minimal smile. The girl surveying her image could imagine her twisting into a more sinister expression in the blink of an eye.

_“Is your name Nupur?! Are you Zero?!”_

_Selene was looking at her, but she could not answer._

She had the sudden realization that she did not know her own name. She did not know her age, or what state she came from, or whether she had a driver’s license. She did not even know what her own face looked like.

There was another patent leather purse in the wine case, but this one was a creamy pink and had the oblong face of a cat face. Of all of the items in the box, she most wanted this to be hers, and now she thought it might be. She unsnapped the handbag at the nose and pried it open to find something, anything. She dumped out the lip balm, the hand sanitizer, the smart phone protected by a rubber case with cat ears, until somehow everything was on the floor except for the card in her hand, a driver’s license from Delaware.

The girl looked too young to have a driver’s license. She had a shy smile and long, dark hair. Her face was the same deep brown as the thumb holding her card. Her name was Nupur Mukherji.

Gale, Shapley, Mukherji. She had co-authored that algorithm. Just as she turned to give the program another look, a popup came up on the computer in the style of an outdated Windows operating system.

> **Warning: Consciousness State Change Detected**
> 
> The system does not detect all players within the chamber. Proceed to the chamber within one minute or bracelets will automatically inject.

She did not know the meaning of the threat carried by the warning. She complied because it was a simple request. There were consequences to disobedience. She blindly avoided such consequences.

Though she did not know what was meant by the chamber, she did not have many options to guess from. This room was not the correct chamber, and the door with the window in the outer hallway was still locked when she tried it again. She opened the only remaining door.

The fluorescent lighting and the shine of a projector seared her dilated eyes at first. She squinted through the light and entered.

Five people lay dead before her.

_“Augh, fuck!” he yelled, clutching his wrist. “You shitbag! Did you fucking lie to me?!”_

_“Wh-what?! No!” said someone she couldn’t see. “You—did you spell it wrong?!”_

_“N-U-P-U-R, just like I f-fucking said!” he snapped._

_“But that’s… that’s… the name…”_

_Selene gave a groan as she fell to one knee. “Are you?” she could barely say. “Are you… the one who… did this…?”_

_The bodies clattered to the ground one by one._

She tried to scream, but the air slid through her larynx unvoiced. Her body faded in and out of her awareness. She did not feel the concrete hit her when she collapsed.


	8. Parameters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so, a couple days ago, I was like, "wow, I'm more than halfway through my story and I'm under 20k words, this isn't good," and now here is a chapter that is about 6k words. I had a feeling this was going to happen to the second half of the story.

“Whoa, Kitty, are you okay?”

The girl known as Kitty once upon a timeline felt a sting on her hands and an ache in her bones. Long strands of her dark, coarse hair slid off of her shoulders and into her face. She pushed herself away from a cool, concrete floor without thinking to look for the woman who had spoken to her. As far as she could remember, no one had ever called her Kitty before.

“Was that you just now? Did you fall?”

She looked up. A young woman squatted beside her, her skin dark and warm except where it ran green and purple from the edge of her left eyebrow to the apple of her cheek. Strands of bright violet coiled around the long twists in her hair, half of which were piled in a fat bun on the top of her head, leaning left. Her eyes, her face, and the shape of her hairline were all round, especially when juxtaposed with her long neck and broad shoulders. Her smile—full lips with a hint of gloss, gleaming teeth—was enchanting.

“Hey, Kitty,” she said. “You feeling okay?”

“Kitty?” repeated the girl.

“Ah, that’s what we called you last time. That’s what we’re gonna call you. I’m Chantal, by the way.”

Kitty blinked the blur from the corners of her vision. Behind Chantal and her warm, oblivious smile were the bodies lying limp on the concrete that had made Kitty faint.

“Th-those people,” she gasped.

“They’ll wake up soon,” replied Chantal. “Game’s about to start.” She gave a glance to the side and a jerk of her head in the same direction.

**THE HEX GAME BEGINS IN**

**15:13**

_Zero awaits you_

“Hex Game,” Kitty murmured. That was the name of the primary function of the program she had read.

“Don’t worry. I think this’ll be my third time playing,” she said. “I’m gonna get us out this time, for sure. I remember almost everything from last time.”

“Last time?” Kitty repeated.

“Yeah, see, I’m an esper,” she explained. “I keep resetting to the start of this game, and I’m not gonna stop till we win.”

“How do we win?” Kitty asked.

“We have to figure out Zero’s name,” Chantal said. “The joker who put us all here and made us play this messed-up game. That’s Zero. Their name is the password to get out that door with the six on it.”

Kitty did not need to turn around to realize that Chantal was pointing at the door through which Kitty had originally entered the room. She turned her head anyway.

_“Type in N-U-P-U-R,” called a voice, loudly and clearly, rousing her from reverie._

_“Nupur?” asked Selene. “Then… if Zero’s supposed to be one of us…”_

_“You’re fucking sure,” demanded the man by the door, his finger hovering over the keypad._

_“I know that’s Zero’s name. I don’t know if it’s the password.”_

_“Password is Zero’s name, a hundred percent,” stated Chantal. “Trust me.”_

“Kitty? You okay?”

Her first name was the password. Her last name was embedded in the program that ran the game.

“I… I’m…” Her voice shook and ultimately cracked. Tears brimmed in her eyes before she knew they were coming. “I think I’m… _I’m_ Zero.”

Chantal snapped her smiling mouth shut and stared at Nupur with wild eyes.

“I w-was… I found this computer,” she blubbered. “I-it had… my name in it—my name was—they said my name was—”

“Whoa, slow down there, cutie pie.” Chantal slid out of her squatting position to sit cross-legged on the floor. “You know what your name is?”

“I—I think so,” she sniffed. “I think I’m… I’m Nupur Mukherji. I-I found this—I think it was my ID card, a-and—”

“Where’d you find all this stuff? You said there was a computer?”

“I was… there’s a hallway outside, I was—there’s another room, down that—”

“Holy _fuck_ ,” Chantal cut in, her round eyes even rounder. “You were outside?! How’d you get out of here?!”

Nupur pointed at the Number 6 Door. There was a beat of silence, then Chantal had jumped to her feet. Her heels clicked against the concrete when she leapt over the long, thin man to make her way to the door through which Nupur was sure she had entered. The handle did not budge when Chantal yanked on it, nor did the door give way when she slammed her body into it.

“Damn,” she growled. “Oh, if this was all some huge reverse-psychology prank, and the door was never really locked… I don’t think I ever tried it before. I just heard someone say they checked all the doors and I didn’t question it."

She gave the door a vain kick and sighed, falling back to a squat.

“So how’d you get out?” Her words came out mumbled because the movement of her jaw was impeded by the fists propping up her chin. “Door’s really locked till we get the password, isn’t it.”

“Th-they got the password,” Nupur said in a high, tight voice. “Someone said—”

“Whoa, shit, wait!” Chantal jumped out of her squat and spun around in the air. She landed with a loud clack on her shoes, facing Nupur. “You remember this game?! You’re doing the reset thing, too?!”

Nupur’s jaw hung open. It was a second before she could shake her head. “I just… I only remember them typing in the password. They said it was—”

“Wait, we never got the password,” Chantal interrupted, frowning. “Zero hit the kill-everyone button the first time, then I fucked up and hit it the second time, and this is the third…”

She held a hand to her furrowed brow, lips twitching around silent words as she tried to reconcile all of the information presented.

“Let’s wait on Lily to wake up,” she sighed. “I pretend like I know what’s going on here, but really, it’s all just kinda happening to me, y’know? I don’t really get it. I just know you and me are playing Groundhog Day and every time we die, we start back at the beginning of the game. We need Lily to explain this better.”

“Who’s Lily?” asked Nupur.

“Oh, you don’t remember everyone’s names?”

Nupur shook her head. “I found some people’s wallets and purses and things outside, and they had everyone’s IDs,” she said, “and I remembered seeing Selene, and I think…”

She let her eyes wander over the bodies lying on the floor. Their chests moved with slow, gentle rhythm. She had seen them die, she was sure, but now they were alive, just asleep. The man lying between them had the curly hair to match the photos on the IDs of someone named either Ian or Felix or something in Greek.

“What’s his name?” Nupur asked, pointing.

“This asshole? He’s Ian,” replied Chantal. “You remember him?”

“M-maybe,” she mumbled. He had the shape of the man by the keypad in her fuzzy memories.

Her legs still felt like jelly when she tried to stand. She wobbled like a newborn deer when she tried to turn around and get a closer look at the other three people in their company. She recognized Selene, saying the name as she did, as the small thing in a blazer between the two bulkier bodies in hoodies, one grey and one purple. The grey jacket belonged to a heavily breathing young man with brown hair cropped close and uneven. The girl in the purple jacket lay with her face turned away from Nupur, but she had a half-inch of brown at the roots of her bleached hair.

“Is she… Sarah?” Nupur asked.

“Huh? Naw, that’s Lily,” Chantal said. “Who’s Sarah?”

Nupur had to hold out her arms to keep herself steady enough to turn around and face Chantal again. “I… I found everyone’s IDs,” she said. “I found Selene’s and mine and—and Ian’s, and… I thought she was Sarah.”

“You found an ID for someone named Sarah?”

“Uh-huh. Sarah Anderson, I think.”

Chantal’s eyes flicked wide for a fraction of a second. “Seriously?” she asked.

The boy’s heavy breathing stuttered and quieted. Nupur turned her head over her shoulder and saw him shifting just before the line where the floor met the wall went sideways.

She did not hit the concrete. Chantal grabbed her small, limp body out of the air with a, “Whoa, shit!” and then, close to her ear, a quietly whispered, “Keep that piece a secret for now, okay? We’ll play our cards smart. Kitty? …Nupur?”

She could not remember what she was supposed to keep secret. Her mind was empty. She did not know who was speaking or who was rising, or who was grabbing her arms, and why was it so hard to breathe.

**THE HEX GAME BEGINS IN**

**10:25**

_Zero awaits you_

Nupur grew heavier in Chantal’s arms until Chantal found herself stooping over and had to lay the fainted young woman on the ground. “Shit, shit, shit—Kyle!” she called desperately. “Kyle, fuck, do you know first aid or anything?!”

His sneakers squeaked as he scrambled to his feet and raced across the chamber, but he saw Ian first and dropped to his knees by the man’s side. “The fuck happened?!” he demanded.

“Fuck him, he’s fine, he’s just sleeping like you were,” Chantal snapped, waving Kyle towards her and Nupur. “This girl, she was awake until she just…”

Nupur’s long, dark lashes fluttered. She opened her blank eyes to Chantal’s relieved smile.

“You okay, cutie?” she sighed, stroking the stray hair from Nupur’s face. “Just lie down for a little while, okay? You got time. Still waiting on three more people to wake up.”

Nupur managed a nod, but she did not meet Chantal’s eyes.

“The fuck is going on,” Kyle muttered as he stared at the chamber in horror.

Chantal caught the sheen of wetness around his puffy eyes when he turned his head. “Whoa, dude, are you crying?”

“W—what?! N-no, I…” He rubbed his face clean with a vigorous swipe of his sleeve. “I get—my eyes get all dry when I first—it’s not… I wasn’t.”

Perhaps Chantal had never seen him up close before, but the bags under his eyes were desperately deep and creased. His droopy eyes looked like death.

“You okay, dude?” she asked. “You don’t… look too good.”

He gave her a look and muttered, “You’re the one with a black eye.”

“What? Seriously?” Chantal pressed a finger against her eyelid gingerly to test its sensitivity. A dull ache greeted her touch.

“Not really a black eye. Just… bruised up, all around your eye, basically,” he mumbled. “Did… did you say my name before? How did you…”

“I’m a wizard. Just wait, Kyle, I’ll explain everything soon. Look, Ian woke up.”

Ian rolled himself to his knees and elbows with a groan first before stepping up to his feet.

“Behind you, bud,” Chantal said when Ian gazed around the chamber with his back to the Number 6 Door and, thus, to three of his fellow players. “Miss me?”

Ian’s eyebrows shot up when he turned around. “Whoa, hey, Chantal,” he said. “God, I don’t even remember seeing you last night. How fucked up was I?”

“Super fucked up,” she teased. “Check out who’s still knocked out behind you.”

Ian threw his hands up to his head and yanked at the hair at his scalp when his eyes settled on Selene. “Aw, fuck. _Fuck_.”

“Just kidding. We were all drugged and kidnapped and we’re gonna get forced to play a weird puzzle-mystery game for about an hour or we’ll die.”

He did not react, because that answer sounded more like a lie than her first answer. Chantal rolled her eyes with a sigh. She found Kyle staring at her, terror in his wide, red eyes.

“We’ll _die_?” he repeated. “What… what the hell are you…?”

“ _Oh_ , my _God_ , this is gonna be so tiring to explain five times, Jesus _Christ_ ,” she complained. “Just let Selene and Lily wake up, and I’ll get this show on the road. Explanations up to your ears, promise. Even Ian’s weird, stuck-out ears, all the way up there.”

“They only look like they stick out because I tie my hair back,” Ian recited on an exhausted breath.

“You haven’t changed your style in ten damn years, have you, you son of a bitch?”

“I stick with what works,” he replied with a wink.

Kyle’s head snapped back and forth between the two friends with an increasingly anxious expression. “Are you—were you just kidding?” he asked. “We’re not—we’re not _really_ gonna die?”

“Nah, we’re not gonna die, because I’m gonna kick serious ass and win the game. Third time’s the charm,” replied Chantal. “Oh, thank God, is that Lily moving?”

“It’s the girl that isn’t Selene,” said Ian. “Is that Lily?”

“Pretty sure, yup.”

Slowly, with trepidation, Nupur rolled her body towards the impostor. The young woman who called herself Lily settled her limbs as if trying to find a more comfortable position against the concrete, before evidently realizing she was pressed against concrete.

Chantal cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “Hey, Lily, we’re playing a real-life version of one of your video games with Zero and shit, and I’m an esper-whatsit, and I got a shit-ton of questions!”

Lily’s head shot up so fast that her glasses slid down her sharp nose and clattered to the floor. She whipped her head towards them, squinting at the blur of people, before snatching up her glasses. That short glimpse was enough for Nupur to notice the sharpness of her nose, the thickness of her eyebrows, and the angles of her jawline. Time and a weak grip on consciousness blurred her memory, but Lily’s face did not seem to match the pictures on Sarah Anderson’s ID cards.

“Um, what?” Lily responded politely.

“Take a look at the projector, I guess?” Chantal recommended. “I think you figured it out soon as you looked at it, last time.”

**THE HEX GAME BEGINS IN**

**6:12**

_Zero awaits you_

“Oh my God,” Lily uttered. “No… no _way_.”

“Yeah, way. I think I’ve died at least twice so far,” replied Chantal, reveling in the nonchalance. “So instead of explaining the video games all over again, can you skip all that and explain how the fuck espers work? Because I am _not_ getting this.”

“You think _you’re_ not getting this?” Ian laughed desperately, shaking his head. “What the hell is going on, Chantal?”

“Completely ignore him and listen only to me and maybe Nupur if she has something to ask.” Chantal marched towards Lily, holding unbreakable eye contact. “We die when the game ends, but I keep coming back to the start. I remember the whole game before this, and a little bit of a game before that, but Nupur remembers a game before this that was totally different from the games I remember. What’s going on?”

Lily swallowed all of the information and digested it during the silent three seconds that followed. “It’s… it’s not linear,” she mumbled. “The quantum theory of, of multiple universes…”

“What the ever-living _fuck_ is going on?!” Ian shouted.

“Can’t you, like, wake up Selene and get all your bickering out of the way while I’m busy?” Chantal barked back. “Lily, I’m beggin’ you, please. As little science as possible, okay? I was a liberal arts major. And then a dropout, so, like. Keep it simple.”

“R-right. Okay.” Lily closed her eyes and nodded. “Let’s say… let’s say I’m going to flip a coin. Is it going to be heads or tails?”

Chantal was vaguely aware of Selene’s voice, but she ignored it and shrugged. “I dunno, it’s fifty-fifty.”

“Exactly. There’s two possibilities, it could be either,” said Lily. “The multiverse theory says that, every time there are multiple possible outcomes of an event, the universe splits into two. One universe where the coin lands heads, one where it’s tails. So there’s an universe out there for every possible outcome of events that have ever happened, or could have happened, in… in the entire history of the universe.”

Her eyes drifted over Chantal’s shoulder at a squabble unfolding between Ian and the recently awakened Selene. Though her speech slowed at points, Lily did not stop her explanation.

“Technically it’s more complicated than that, because the act of flipping a coin isn’t actually a random event, since it’s determined by the way you choose to toss the coin,” she rambled on. “The real branching points go down to quantum mechanics and the behavior of subatomic particles, because—”

“ _Lily_.” Chantal clapped a hand on her thick shoulder. “You’re killing me, Lily. You might literally be killing me.”

“R-right! Sorry,” she stammered. “Um, so if we assume it’s possible that subatomic particles might be responsible for human split-second decisions, if I ask you to call what the coin’s going to be…”

“Heads?”

“Yeah, okay. And there’s another alternate universe where you said tails,” Lily said. “And then once I flip the coin, it could be heads or tails, so we’re up to four different universes, all branching out from one moment in time.”

“Is this getting back to my questions?” Chantal asked.

“Yes! Yes. Right now,” Lily promised. “So let’s imagine, for some reason, you thought it was so desperate for you to get this coin flip right—like your life depended on it, or something—that you activated your ability to jump back in time. So the second time you play the coin flip, you pick the other option. You say tails.”

“I follow, but I have no idea where we’re going.”

“It’s—that’s why things aren’t linear for you and… and someone else is an esper? Because you’re jumping back and controlling timelines differently by making new decisions,” Lily explained. “You made new choices to make your timeline different from the last one you experienced. The other esper did the same thing. You happened to run into each other having walked two different paths.” She traced four invisible lines on the concrete, all branching out from the same point. “If we pretend the thing causing the timeline to split was you calling the coin and the coin getting flipped, we could say you first experienced the timeline where you picked heads and the coin flipped tails, then you jumped back and said tails and the coin flipped heads that time. Now you’re back at the start, and you think you’re going to say heads this time, and the other esper just happened to come in from the timeline where you say tails and the coin flips tails.” Lily looked up from her invisible drawing. “So maybe this time, you’re in the timeline where you win. You pick heads, and the coin flips heads.”

“But I won in the other timeline, too,” Chantal said. “The one Nupur came from, the tails-tails. Why’d she reset if I won?”

“Well, maybe when you win, she loses.”

Chantal suddenly remembered things she wished she had pressed further. In Nupur’s timeline, the players entered the password to open the Number 6 Door, yet she returned. And she had wondered if she herself was Zero.

“But, I mean, that was just the example of four concrete timelines. You didn’t really flip coins,” said Lily, “right?”

“Right,” Chantal murmured, looking over her shoulder.

Selene had folded her arms and shut her mouth. Ian was back to smiling, though it looked a bit strained. Kyle sat near Nupur, glancing at her intermittently as if worried she might collapse again.

“Hey, can Zero be the amnesiac?” asked Chantal.

Lily started. “There’s an amnesiac?” she gasped. “There’s—there’s literally… this is…”

“Yeah, let’s get this explanation going,” Chantal declared, hopping up onto her feet. “Time’s up, anyway, in… three, two, one, zero. Motherfuck.”

**WELCOME TO THE HEX GAME**

**65:59**

“Okay, non-psychic _losers_ , listen up, ’cuz I’m about to explain the rules real quick for everybody so y’all don’t have to read all that shit!” Chantal announced. “We’re gonna need all the extra time we can get, promise.”

Ian cautiously approached the projection in front of which she had planted herself. Selene shot daggers into his back with her eyes before shuffling forward, as well. Kyle glanced at Nupur, who did not dare try to move, so he remained where he was. Lily was the only one unafraid to advance.

“So there’s some Japanese video games Lily plays, and we’re playing a real life version of it,” Chantal explained. “She likes to get super in-depth when she explains things, and it’s cute as shit, but we ain’t got time for that, so here’s the lowdown.”

Lily turned bright red. Chantal had not forgotten the compliment Lily had paid her in another timeline about being outrageously well-built, and she was not about to let that knowledge go to waste.

“This is an escape-the-room game where we solve puzzles to live,” she went on. “Some fucker called Zero’s the one hosting this little death party, and they’re secretly one of the players, nobody knows who. Every game, there’s an amnesiac—that’s Nupur, everybody say hi—and there’s a sexy badass, too, so that’s obviously me, and there’s psychic shit! That’s me _and_ Nupur, again. We’re the espers.”

“Chantal, what the fuck is this,” Ian demanded.

“This is Zero’s idea of a good fuckin’ time!” she replied. “We got sixty-six minutes to escape this chamber or we all fuckin’ die. Anybody notice these weird watch-things? They’ll inject you with poison if you try to pull ’em off, and they’ll inject you with poison if you break the rules or you don’t get out in time or, if you’re a dumbass like me, you punch the big red reset button underneath the keypad by the Number 6 Door because you think it’s some kinda secret escape button. Sorry to all your alternate universe selves.”

“But why the _fuck_ are we here?!” Selene yelled.

“We got drugged and kidnapped and dropped in here, probs.”

“But _why_?!”

“I dunno, because Zero…”

She trailed off. Her wide smile faded as she looked over her shoulder at the rules, looking for the passage she had not understood until, just maybe, now. Selene had guessed at it during the last game, but since then, even more pieces had come together.

> The purpose of a Hex is to set aside the small puzzle in front of you in exchange for an opportunity to solve the larger puzzle surrounding this game. The A-Type players each hold within them the reason that I have gathered us all here today.

“To solve the larger puzzle surrounding this game,” she mumbled.

“How long have you been stuck in here?” Ian asked.

“Linearly or nonlinearly?” muttered Lily.

“Complicated question. Just pretend I got a bad, super-real case of déjà-vu,” she replied, shooting him a finger gun as she clicked her tongue. “So we’re split up in two teams by letters. You got a letter and a number on your bracelet, that’s your team. We split off into pairs, one person from each team, and we go solve puzzles together in the Hex Rooms—that’s those little rooms down the tiny hallway. Super fun! Lots of weird shit, like severed arms!”

Kyle turned pale. Even from a distance, Chantal could see his whole body go rigid.

“We decide who goes with who with the bracelet buttons,” she said. “Everybody’s got a number next to their letter, right? And you’re ranking people on the other team. So if I wanna go with…” She took a quick glance at her bracelet. “Whatever the other letter is, I forget. With number one on your side. I push that button first. You rank all the players in order, how much you like ’em, or how good you think they’ll be at puzzles, whatever’s your game. Then you hit the side button to send it, and the computer spits out the pairs. We start with the first three Hex Rooms—that’s the puzzle places—then we switch up the partners next round and go into the next three.”

“But _why_?” Ian asked. Selene knew he was mocking her earlier intonation, but Chantal was too focused on her rapid-fire explanation to notice.

“Great question! Don’t really know, but if you don’t wanna deal with it, you can give the fuck up and hit the big ole Hex button inside your room!” she went on. “It’s just a timer or something, and it’s supposed to take longer than it would take for you to really solve the puzzle, but it means you can sit around and shoot the shit and try to figure out who the fuck Zero is with your puzzle-pal. Sooner you press it, sooner it starts counting down, sooner it’s over.”

“So we don’t really want to press the button because it makes things take longer?” Lily asked.

“Unless Zero asks you to crack open a fucking _safe_ , because the timer only went twenty minutes or so on that one, and there’s no goddamn way any real human could crack a damn safe in less than twenty minutes with some dinky toolbox. Make good choices, my dudes.”

“So… you know some of the puzzles?” Lily said. “Because you played the game before.”

Chantal’s eyes went wide. “Wait, shit,” she realized. “I know _all_ the puzzles. Everybody had the same puzzles. All the rooms are the same. The first one, you gotta give an injection on the fake severed arm thing, and it shows a code for the door, and the second one’s a safe and you gotta throw in the towel.”

“But how do those puzzles help us get out of here?” asked Ian.

“Because… because we get hints after we do them,” Chantal said. “For how to open the door and get out. The Number 6 Door.”

But Chantal had already gotten that hint from between the First and Second Hexes. She could relay it right now, and the inquiries could begin, with a full hour remaining.

“The key is probably to separate us into smaller groups,” Lily said directly into the knuckle of the finger she had pressed to her lips. “You can get more information from someone if you’re with them one-on-one.”

“Yeah, there’s… some kind of mystery we’re supposed to solve,” Chantal murmured. “Me, Ian, and Selene, we’re the team that’s supposed to know what’s going on, even though we… we totally don’t.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know what’s going on?” Selene retorted. “You know fucking _everything_ that’s going on. You explained this whole game without reading the rules. Are you the… the Zero person?”

Chantal froze with her jaw slightly ajar.

“Chantal,” uttered Ian. “What. The _fuck_. Are you doing.”

“No, I just… I played this game before,” she protested. “You can’t win the game without a psychic person, and that’s me. I keep traveling through time to play the game again so we can win. This is my third game.”

“The esper doesn’t usually remember all this stuff,” murmured Lily, a crease in her brow. “They just… remember little things. It’s hard to remember what happened. They don’t remember _everything_.”

Chantal felt her face grow hot. “Well, I… I do, okay? Maybe I’m just a really good psychic!”

“Chantal, seriously,” Ian said, “this isn’t funny, or cool, or whatever you think it is. This is multiple felonies. Kidnapping, drugging, death threats…” He glanced up. “Probably some kind of building code violation, too. What the hell is this place?”

Chantal decided to keep the clue about the password to herself.

“Okay, wanna hear something I _don’t_ know?” she shot back at them. “I _don’t_ know how the fuck we get out of here. I _don’t_ know who Zero is, even though I fucking saw them once and I can’t remember which one of you it was. I’m fucking _sick_ of dying over and over again, let me fucking tell you. I’m telling you everything I know because I need your help. I’ve lost this game twice already, so clearly I can’t fucking do this by myself. I want to get you guys out of here. I don’t want you to… I don’t want to have to see you die again.”

Ian and Selene kept up their hard stares, but Selene’s was starting to break. Lily nodded gravely, biting her lip. Nupur was still in a daze, but her eyes were awestruck. Kyle’s soft eyebrows came together and quivered like no one had ever cared about him this much before in his life.

“I don’t care if you don’t trust me when I say I’m definitely not Zero, no fucking way,” Chantal said. “But I need you to work with me.”

“Fine,” sighed Selene, casting her eyes away in a hurry. “So we have to do the voting thing, right?”

Chantal beamed and nodded. She pointed out Nupur with her left hand and Lily with her right. “You two, just sayin’, top picks,” she said. “What’s your number, Nupur? We gotta keep talking.”

Lily stared at the hand thrust in her direction. “Um, didn’t you say we have to pair up with someone with a different letter?” she asked. “I’m… I’m a Q, too. I mean, a Q, also. I’m Q3.”

Chantal’s face froze just before it fell. She stared at her bracelet.

Q1.

“Wait, who the hell is a Q-Type?” she demanded. “And whatever the other letter is! Who’s…?”

Everyone checked their bracelets. “Other letter’s A,” replied Ian. “I’ve got A1. Heh, like the sauce.”

Nupur raised an unsteady hand. “I’m Q2,” she said weakly.

“This is different. This is totally different,” Chantal said. “Fuck, this isn’t the same game. I was on the same team with Ian and Selene before. Lily, what’s going on?!”

Lily blinked. “Wh—why are you asking me?”

“Your multiple universes shit! I thought I go back to the same point each time, but…”

She held her head and spun in circles, looking around the room for what was different and what was the same. The bracelets were different—at least, some of them, since Ian had made his stupid joke about steak sauce again. At a glance, the rules on the projection looked the same, as did the timer. Nupur came through a different door this time—last time, she had woken up in the bathroom; this time, she had possibly started from the door on the other side of the room, though Chantal had only woken after hearing the girl hit the floor. Her hair had not always been so disheveled, either, she thought.

There was a tangled pile of a length of tightly coiled rope just beside the entrance to the Hex Room hallway. There was another pile of the same stuff, but sliced into many severed pieces, in the corner between the projection and the bathroom.

“Where’d that rope come from?” Chantal muttered.

“Chantal, what’s your goddamn number,” Ian said loudly, as if he had been trying to get her attention for a short while. “You were the one who wanted to speed things up, right? Quit fucking around.”

“This is serious! The game’s different this time!” Chantal insisted. “I don’t know what’s—how could it have changed before I even woke up?”

“It’s not unprecedented, actually,” said Lily. “Sometimes the choices you make in the future influence events that have occurred in the past. Have you ever heard of Schrödinger’s Cat?”

Chantal snuck a glance at Nupur’s cat-adorned sweater and smirked.

“Nope, no, we’re not going down this road, holy shit, _no_ ,” Selene declared, stomping on her platform heels to cut between Lily and Chantal. “Schrödinger came up with that thought experiment to explain how _stupid_ it is to apply quantum mechanics to anything that’s not on a quantum scale, like fucking cats, so whatever explanation you’re about to start spouting is complete bullshit. Let’s hurry up and play this stupid game so we don’t die trying to explain why Chantal’s completely losing it.”

Lily winced and nodded. “Chantal, what’s your number?”

“Well, if we die this time, too, at least I can go out knowing a cute girl asked me for my number,” sighed Chantal.

Lily’s white face flamed, and Chantal grinned. She was not usually this good at flirting. She had messed it up last time when she forgot to specifically request Lily’s phone number as part of the joke about listing her as a reference. There was a lot riding on the success of this timeline.

“Chantal, do you want us to fucking die or not?!” Selene yelled.

“Jesus, okay, it’s one. Q1,” Chantal uttered. “Can’t you do a little process-of-elimination? Lily’s three, Nupur’s two, we all established I’m Q-Type now for some absurd fucking reason, and you got three little buttons on your bracelet. Who the fuck d’you think I am?”

Selene rolled her eyes so hard that they went completely white at the apex of the circle. “I’m A2, anyway,” she said, punching in her buttons. “Might fucking need that if you wanna actually _play_ this game you’re so goddamn pleased about.”

“Yeah, yeah, fuck you.” Chantal pointed her burgundy nails at the first second buttons on her bracelet, accounting for Ian and Selene. “So who’s number three? A3?”

“Can’t you do a little process-of-elimination?” muttered Kyle, peering at his bracelet.

Kyle had taken the nickname One in the previous game because of his bracelet. Ian had been Steak Sauce, so that took care of A1. Chantal was wearing Kyle’s bracelet. She could not remember her own code from the last game, but it made sense that he was wearing hers.

“Number three, more like number one on my list,” Chantal stated. “You and I are gonna have a nice little chat if it kills me.”

Kyle shuddered. “Can I redo my answers?”

“Aw, fuck you, dude.”

She clicked the number three button just as she promised. Before she could make a decision between one and two, she glanced over at the piles of rope. The pile frayed fragments must have been sliced with a blade to untie something. The other rope, still fully intact, had kinks in it as if it had been used, but untied. She was sure that these things had never been in the room before. Her first instinct was to think that the rope had been used to restrain the game players as part of their kidnapping. However, there was no need to use rope on an unconscious body. Perhaps some of the players—for instance, Nupur—had not stayed unconscious.

She could not join Nupur in a Hex Room to discuss what had happened to her in the Hex Game she remembered, nor what she had discovered before this one began. She could not ask Lily what all of this meant in regards to the multiverse theory. It was so obstructive to her goals that she had to believe that Zero had swapped her bracelet with Kyle’s for this very reason. What she did not understand was how Zero could have changed the Hex Game before she even woke up and remembered she was an esper.


	9. Nᵗʰ Hex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CONTENT WARNING: MENTIONS OF A PAST SUICIDE**
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> It's getting to the point where I can't respond to your comments without either giving things away or just saying ":^)" but I really really love reading your comments guys... this is so good...... your suspicions give me life..............
> 
> So to everyone who commented:
> 
> :^)
> 
> And thanks for reading.

For all of her talk about wanting to expedite the game, the other players ended up waiting on Chantal to submit her preferences for the matching process. They watched her punch in the numbers with a confused grimace stuck to her face that only intensified when she finished.

“Wait, what?!” she cried out. “That’s—that’s not what I put in!”

“Chantal, how do you fuck up pressing three buttons?” Ian groaned.

“I swear to God, I put in three, one, two, and it blinked back three, two, one!”

Selene rolled her eyes. “You hit the last two buttons too fast, I saw,” she said. “It probably overloaded the circuit or whatever. Do you hate me so much it matters whether I’m second or third?”

“No, I—actually, I couldn’t figure out how to pick between you two, but—did anybody else’s fuck up like that?” Chantal asked. “When the lights blink back at you, it’s supposed to do the same order you put in. Did everybody else’s…?”

Kyle shrugged. “I wasn’t really looking. I didn’t know it was gonna do that at all.”

“Same, actually,” said Selene.

“I _think_ mine blinked back the same order I put in,” said Lily, frowning at her wrist.

“What’s done is done,” said Ian, pointing at the projection. “Looks like it didn’t matter that you put me last, anyhow.”

**FIRST HEX**

**Q1, A1**

**Q2, A2**

**Q3, A3**

**Proceed to the unlocked Hex Rooms**

No one looked particularly pleased by the outcome. No one seemed to like each other very much.

“What’s the puzzle, again?” asked Selene. “Severed arms?”

“There’s a bottle of black ink and you gotta inject it into the vein of this dummy arm and a code will show up,” said Chantal. “I figured it out and it worked. I believe in y’all.”

“U-uh, g-guys,” called Kyle in a wavering voice, “who—who’s going with her?”

Her head hanging low, Nupur planted a hand on the wall behind her for support, but her elbow buckled. With his feet squared and his bent knees stretching out the wide, long legs of his distressed jeans, Kyle hovered near her uncertainly, waiting for her to flutter to the ground like a house of cards that he would not be able to catch anyway.

“She’s mine. What’s wrong?” Selene asked, not because she cared about Nupur’s wellbeing, but because she wanted to know what was impeding gameplay.

“I… I’m sorry,” Nupur said softly, holding her head. Her weight shifted from foot to foot. “I just… I don’t feel all… here, really. I’m not sure what’s…”

Selene marched to Nupur and put a hand on her back. She sent a stern stare to Chantal. “Inject the arm with the ink?”

“Yeah. Let’s all do it quick,” Chantal said, eyebrows drawn together as she watched Nupur struggle to keep up with Selene’s pace.

The lights in the small, cinderblock-walled Hex Rooms only turned on once the door was shut. The projectors only turned on after every door was shut.

 “So… do you have any idea what’s going on here?” asked Kyle.

Lily exhaled. It felt like she had been keeping some small pocket of air permanently inside of her lungs before that point, like she was breathing in but not all the way out for the past fifteen minutes.

“I probably have more of an idea of what’s going on than most people,” she said. “I don’t know whether or not Chantal is telling the truth, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Well, I don’t know if you see any severed arms, but I sure don’t,” said Kyle, “so I think that means she’s lying.”

The projector turned on.

**WELCOME TO THE FIRST HEX**

**The Password is Inside the Box**

**53:57**

“ _Fuck!_ ” Chantal yelled, stomping her feet.

Ian sighed as he picked up the wooden box. It just barely fit in his large grip and rattled when he turned it over. “Tell me I’ll find that severed arm inside of this box, Chantal,” he said.

“You won’t.” She threw her head skyward and groaned. “I fucked up. This stupid fucking game.”

“So is this supposed to be the safe?” he asked.

“Does it _look_ like a safe?” she snapped.

“Then what am I looking at, Chantal?”

“Zero making me look like a goddamn fool, that’s what.” She pointed at the red button under the keypad by the door. “Wanna just hit this?”

He frowned, his thumbs pressed white against the broadest face of the box. “Didn’t you say that would make this take longer?”

“Yeah, but you probably have questions for me, and I’ve got questions for you,” she said, “and I sure as fuck don’t wanna sit around trying to bust open that box when I could be sitting around getting real shit done instead.”

He pressed his mouth shut tight as he gave the box another careful look. “All I’d need to break this is a pair of pliers,” he muttered. “The wood’s so thin, it would probably snap if I could get a good grip on this edge and—”

“Well, we don’t have any damn pliers.”

She slammed her fist into the button without taking her eyes off of him. His jaw dropped and his face seized up as if he had been betrayed.

“Why the fuck did you do that?!” he yelled. “I didn’t say you could push it!”

There was something she wanted to say, but her throat closed up when her mouth tried to form the words.

“My hand slipped,” she joked.

He threw the box at her head.

**YOU HAVE ACCEPTED THE HEX**

**UNKNOWN TIME REMAINING**

“This honestly seems like the best idea,” Selene sighed, her fingers slipping down the surface of the red button at uneven rates after she depressed it. “I don’t have the patience for this kind of thing, and you’re… well.”

Nupur was lying on the ground. Upon entering the Hex Room, what strength she had dissipated, and she collapsed. She showed the barest signs of consciousness—blinking, moving her lips as if trying to speak—which was one reason Selene was still talking. Mostly she was talking to herself to calm her nerves.

“Why did I pick you first, anyway?” she groaned. “What fucking picks you three were. You, Chantal, and the other girl who’s feeding into whatever shit Chantal’s smoking. I thought you would be at least normal, so we could get shit done, but… here we fucking are. Both being completely useless.”

“Okay,” Nupur whispered weakly, as if she had not understood what Selene had said but was trying to respond somehow.

“Ugh, just… at least sleep, if we’re gonna be stuck here for a long time,” Selene muttered. “Give me a reason to justify wasting all this time. Take a damn nap.”

“Okay.”

“Atta girl.”

 

“I’m sure I can do this,” Lily said. Her eyes had gone a bit wider, and her pupils were dilated. “If anyone here can do this, I can.”

She had already dislodged a corner piece that allowed her to slide an edge piece several millimeters.

**WELCOME TO THE FIRST HEX**

**The Password is Inside the Box**

**52:01**

“So you actually like this puzzle stuff?” Kyle mumbled, watching her hands. Her rapid eyes were more interesting to watch, but he lacked the courage or stamina for elongated eye contact.

“I guess,” she said distantly. “I like having something I need to throw my whole mind at sometimes. So I don’t have to think about other things. Oh, I think this…”

She found a piece that did not slide, but rotated. When turned at the right angle, it gave just enough leeway to grant another small piece some freedom of movement.

“I hope this thing doesn’t have any dead-end paths of action,” she said. “I’d like to think I’m doing the right thing, but it looks like I’m just breaking it.”

“If you break it, that’s still opening it,” Kyle said. “Don’t second-guess yourself. Just keep going.”

She closed her eyes and exhaled. “Tell me if you see anything going on here,” she said.

 

“I’m gonna try jumping on it,” Ian said.

“Dude, we already accepted the Hex. Even if you get the password now, it won’t work on the door,” Chantal said. “And it didn’t break when you fucking threw it at my _face_ , so—”

“My hand slipped,” he jeered.

“Look, I pressed it because I wanna talk to you, dude.” She swallowed. “About what happened two years ago.”

Ian’s face fell, then turned to stone. “I fucking don’t,” he muttered.

“I know. I didn’t, either,” she said, resting her cheeks on her fists. “But it sounds like Sarah’s involved in this game. Sarah Anderson.”

Chantal could see him twitch at the chill running through his spine.

“Selene pointed it out last game,” she said. “Lily, Kyle, and Nupur don’t know each other, and none of us knew them before today. Why do you think Zero picked the three of _us_ to be in the game? If it were something about our whole crew, they coulda picked Bryan, they coulda picked Lucy, they coulda picked Ahmed… but they picked the three of us. The roommates.”

“What the fuck does Sarah want?” muttered Ian.

“Justice. That’s what she always wanted.” Chantal folded her arms. “What do you think really happened?”

He shrugged. “What the police said,” he said. “Suicide.”

“You do not believe what the police said,” she snapped. “You have never in your life believed in the police, Mr. Conspiracy Theorist McGee.”

“I told you, I read about the UFO stuff because I think it’s about secret military tests, not—”

“So you sure as fuck don’t trust the police, do you?”

His face seized with fury for a moment before he was able to smooth it down into mild irritation. “I wanted answers, too, Chantal!” he shouted. “I wanted a clean-cut answer and someone to blame for it as much as the next guy! But there _wasn’t_ one, and the only answer left was suicide.”

“Or one of us three killed him,” Chantal reminded him.

“No, they ruled all of us out, too, and that’s when they went back to the original conclusion of suicide,” Ian said. “You don’t seriously think one of us would do that to him, do you?”

“Someone thinks so,” she said, staring at him with narrow eyes. “Zero thinks so. Zero committed multiple felonies because she thinks so.”

“Why the fuck are you looking at me like that?!” he yelled. “Whatever Sarah fucking thinks, she’s just looking for something to prove her mental image of a brother that wasn’t fucking suicidal!”

“Look, Ian, we all know there was shit going on between you and him right before he—”

A flash of white cut across the room, caused by a flicker from the projector. The message about the Hex gave way to a choppy video, its resolution further blurred by the size of the projection on the wall. The sound came from a tinny speaker on the projector, but it was loud enough that they did not miss a single word.

“ _Continuing developments in the case of Timothy Anderson,_ ” said a young brunette in a blazer to the camera, “ _a twenty-six-year-old man found dead in his storage shed, first presumed to be suicide, but further investigation reveals…_ ”

The shot cut away to two local newscasters turning to each other with furrows in their brow. “ _He left the apartment without his contacts,_ ” murmured one, deep in thought. “ _How strong is that prescription?_ ”

“ _Police say he wouldn’t be able to read the E on top of an eyechart,_ ” said the reporter with a nod. “ _Now, he did not drive to the shed before the—_ ”

The shot cut away again. Selene’s mugshot was on the news this time, next to Chantal’s.

“ _Police are hitting a dead end in this Timothy Anderson case—_ ”

A rotund police officer wearing aviator sunglasses spoke in a gruff voice to a reporter off-screen. “ _What we’re seeing here is that Mr. Anderson may have been assaulted in his apartment prior to his passing away. Some minor battery and possibly a concussion,_ ” he mumbled. “ _However, the only two people in the apartment when he reportedly left were two young women, his roommates, one who’s about five feet tall, and Mr. Anderson was a fairly large young man…_ ”

The next clip was different. It was fuzzier and had no audio. Dark, human shapes jittered across the room. Chantal could only recognize them because she remembered seeing the same thing from a different angle, from the position of the darkest shape in the room. The roundest moved towards a corner of the room while the tallest and thinnest pursued him. Chantal knew to watch Selene’s petite silhouette before she, after a long moment of hesitation, sidled up behind the man she knew was Ian, wrapped her arms around his hips, and flipped him over her head, slamming him headfirst into the concrete.

“Is that me?” Ian uttered.

Chantal opened her mouth to answer and failed to make a sound. Whether or not he recognized himself, all that mattered was that the assaulted man was over a foot taller than Selene.

The video faded to black, and a final message appeared just before they heard the click of the door unlocking.

**DO NOT CONFRONT HER**

“Well, there’s your fucking answer, Chantal. Happy now?”

Chantal shook her head. She was not happy, of course, but she also could not comprehend what she had just seen. Selene would not attack anyone unprovoked, she thought, but there was no reason for her to have attacked Ian in that alternate timeline.

“How is there even video of this?” she wondered aloud, half in a whisper. “This happened in the other game. From a different universe.”

“Chantal, cut the bullshit about alternate universes,” Ian snapped. “They probably exist, sure, but we can’t just jump between them like you keep saying. This video’s proof.”

“But you guys don’t remember it,” she protested. “I can only remember it because I’m an esper, right? And I can barely remember the first game, and I don’t know if I’ve played the one Nupur played.”

“Or,” said Ian, “I can’t remember it because apparently the reason my head hurts and it’s so hard to read is because I was fucking suplexed to the concrete and that completely blacked out my memory of the past few hours.”

By the faint light cast by those glowing words, **DO NOT CONFRONT HER** , Chantal saw him raise his arm to point at her.

“And you have a bruise like you were punched in the face, so the same thing probably happened to you,” Ian said. “That’s why you’re missing memories of some games, at least. Selene probably hit Nupur so hard she knocked her head clean, and now she’s got complete amnesia over her whole life instead of just the past few games.”

Nupur was trapped in a Hex Room with Selene.

“We need to get out of here,” Chantal said, barreling for the door.

 

For a long time, Nupur heard a voice off and on. It took her a while to recognize anything being said as a word, and a little longer after that for her to listen. The words made only a brief stay inside her awareness before they were lost again. She disliked the smell and the texture of the concrete under her cheek, so she forced herself into a sitting position. There was a blank after that—perhaps she went lightheaded—but soon she could recognize Selene’s voice.

“I don’t even know how long it’s been,” she complained, staring at her bracelet. “Why couldn’t they give us a watch that worked like a watch?”

Nupur did not know how long it had been, either, but it felt to her like years, some lost.

“Red’s the worst color to make this place. Makes you anxious to get out,” she muttered. “But we already gave up on whatever was gonna unlock the door, anyway, right? So just… cool it or something.”

Nupur’s eyes had opened all of the way, but the room was still dark. “What’s happening?” she asked weakly.

“Hey, there. Nothing much. Just chill out until the door finally—”

The color and brightness of the room changed in quick flickers. Nupur turned to the projector. Slow blinks cut through her view of the scenes playing out on the wall.

“ _Continuing developments in the case of Timothy Anderson, a twenty-six-year-old man found dead in his storage shed, first presumed to be suicide, but further investigation reveals…_ ”

The video cut to something different this time.

“ _The problem is, he was inside of that shed, right?_ ” said a blonde woman sitting on a TV set couch, shiny legs crossed so she could bounce her strappy heel. “ _Everyone’s suspecting his roommates. I want to suspect his roommates, too, the way that’s all—but the shed had a lock on it, a lock with a PIN that not even his family knew, so how could one of his roommates—_ ”

The video cut out completely, but the audio remained. Ian’s voice was instantly recognizable.

“ _You see anything like a credit card? Something stiff like that, but that you could cut,_ ” he said. “ _Lock on this door, I’ve seen it before. Once I picked it with a couple lockpicks I cut outta credit cards with an Exact-O knife. Perfect crime. After I’m done, I just chop up the card like I was just tryin’ to throw out an old one. Evidence gone. Nobody ever found out._ ”

There was a pause in which the static suddenly dropped to a lower pitch. A bemused, distorted voice replied, “ _Shit, dude. What’d you do?_ ”

The sound returned to its original pitch. “ _Pulled a prank on a friend,_ ” replied Ian. “ _Really got back at him for something he did to me. He didn’t take it too well, but… I don’t regret it._ ”

If the content of the clips and the abrupt end to the audio static were not indication enough that the movie was complete, the message on the projector was.

**DO NOT CONFRONT HIM**

The door had long since unlocked, after Lily had exposed enough of the inside of the box to see the PIN for the keypad. Simultaneous with the click of the deadbolt retracting, the projector began playing video, compelling them to stay and watch to the end, even after Lily’s knees knocked and buckled out from underneath her, and Kyle turned sickly pale and curled around a churning stomach.

“Lily,” said Kyle in a weak voice, “I… saw what Nupur picked on her bracelet.”

“He… he doesn’t even care,” she uttered, holding her shaking hands over her gaping mouth. “He’s a… he…”

“Lily, Nupur picked me first,” Kyle said, louder, but his voice broke as he tried to say it. “I… I picked her second, after you. We’re probably going to get matched next round.”

Lily shook her head. “S-sorry, what’re you…? I can’t…”

“If I go with Nupur, then Chantal has to go with Selene, because she already went with… with him,” he stated. “You’re… you’re gonna get matched with him next round.”

A single tear rolled down her cheek. Kyle only saw it after it sank past her glasses, which reflected the projector and blocked out her wide, red eyes.

He came to his knees beside her. “Like it says, don’t say anything,” he pleaded. “Just act like you didn’t see this. He’s probably… he’s not gonna hurt you if you just… be normal. Help him solve the puzzle and stuff.”

She curled her knees up to her chest and buried her face in her sleeves. His uncertain hand came to rest on her shoulder.

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “You… you shouldn’t have to do this. It’s not fair.”

It took another thirty seconds for her to uncurl enough for him to help her to her feet. He hesitated with his arms just a bit out to his sides, just in case she needed it, and she did. She clutched the shoulders of his hoodie and fell against his soft chest. He closed his arms behind her with a safe pressure: gentle enough that she did not feel trapped, but with just enough presence that it lent her comfort. Then they left.


	10. The Stable Matching Hack

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, to heck with it. I know I just posted a chapter, but. This one was short and I cranked it out fast because I was so excited.

Lily and Kyle were the first to exit their Hex Room, as the only players to solve the puzzle, but Chantal and Ian followed shortly afterwards. By a single glance at their pale faces, Chantal knew they must have seen the murder reel. The less they had to talk about it, the better. She had scarcely asked, “What’s taking them?” when the final Hex Room door opened.

Selene’s hand stayed light on Nupur’s shoulder, but she no longer needed the support. Though her mind remained in a fog, her body had regained its little strength. Her eyes were dark and intense. The thoughts swirling through her head were coalescing into a conclusion.

**SUPPLEMENTARY RULES**

> The password that unlocks the Number 6 Door is Zero’s true name. Ergo, the Hex Game will end when a confession is made. As a reminder, entering an incorrect password for the Number 6 Door will terminate the game, and therefore, your lives.
> 
> _Pena la morte, il nome dell’Ignoto sia rivelato prima del mattino._

**4:48 UNTIL SECOND HEX BEGINS**

“Kyle, hurry up and talk about opera or some shit,” Chantal said.

He started. “H-huh?”

“The Italian thing. It’s an opera line. Something about the princess who has to guess the name…”

“You mean… _Turandot_?” he asked. “What’s…”

He squinted at the supplementary rules. As he gave them a thorough read, his soft eyebrows rose.

“Oh, so this is… yeah, that’s right, _pena la mor—morte…_ ” He swallowed. “We die if we don’t find the name. Zero’s like the unknown prince.”

“Neat. Totally useless information. Zero’s making an opera reference because she’s so cool and smart and cultured.”

“She?” Lily repeated.

“Hey, Lily, question,” said Chantal. “Does Zero _really_ have to be one of the players? Because if not, I got this mystery solved.”

Lily shook her head. “Zero has _always_ been one of the players,” she insisted. “Sometimes Zero is still concealed somehow, of course, because it has to be a mystery, but…”

“Who do you think is Zero if it’s not someone here?” Nupur asked.

“You gave me the clue, Nupe,” Chantal said.

She gave a quick glance to Selene, who was giving a dead stare to Ian.

“It… kind of looks like Zero has to be one of the players,” mumbled Kyle. “The game will end when a confession is made. So we have to get Zero to confess. And if Zero’s not here…”

Chantal groaned with impatience. “I’m gonna be so fucking pissed if it’s who I think it is and she’s just messing with us like this.”

“She did like video games, didn’t she,” muttered Ian. “She was the meek, asocial type.”

“Wait, what the hell do you guys know?” demanded Selene. “Who’re you talking about?”

“She, um, she could be an accomplice,” piped up Lily. “Zero sometimes has an accomplice who isn’t always a player in the game. Well, Zero _once_ had an accomplice who wasn’t a player, but—Zero usually has an accomplice, is the point. So this person could be an outside accomplice, if you, um, think someone else is involved.”

Selene clenched her fists and hiked up her shoulders, puffing out the epaulettes on her blazer. “Who is she?!”

Chantal remembered something Kyle said at this point in time in the other Hex Game, when making his opera analogy.

“She’s Turandot, isn’t she? She’s the princess,” she murmured. “Zero’s the prince, she’s the princess, and we’re the people who’re gonna die if we don’t find her the name.”

Something about the way the words fell out of her mouth made her consider something else.

“What if Zero _isn’t_ the one who set up the game?” Chantal asked. “What if Zero is somebody else, and they don’t even know they’re Zero? And Turandot is the real game master.”

“It’s happened that Zero didn’t know they were Zero,” mumbled Lily, chewing on her knuckle, “but that was… an extreme case.”

“But what if Zero straight up means something different in this game?” Chantal asked. “Like, were the other games so focused on figuring out who Zero was, or were they just kind of about surviving and escaping? Why is this game all about Zero?”

Lily nodded, staring at her toes.

“You said the accomplice sometimes plays the game, as well?” Nupur asked softly.

Lily nodded again. “Once, it literally depended on the timeline the players were in, whether the accomplice was a part of the game or not. That’s where the idea of Schrödinger’s Cat comes into play.”

Nupur closed her eyes whenever she turned her head so that she did not suffer a dizzy spell to see her surroundings spin. She opened her eyes once she was facing Chantal. “Things are different in this timeline, right?” she said. “The game started differently.”

Chantal immediately pointed at the bundles of rope littering their respective corners of the floor. “Yeah, like this random shit,” she said. “Not to mention, Zero switched up our bracelets and put you, me, and Lily on the same team because we know the most about what’s going on here, I think. To separate us, basically.”

“What were the teams originally?” Nupur asked.

Chantal thumbed over both shoulders at Selene and Ian. “Team Former Roomies,” she said, “versus all the rest of y’all. Team Complete Strangers.”

Nupur’s thoughts came together just in time, as the final seconds remaining before the Second Hex dwindled away and the matches appeared on the screen. She did not have the stamina to turn around and see the screen for herself, but she saw the others turn their eyes towards it, and everyone began to shuffle into the next set of rooms.

“Used to be a safe,” said Chantal. “Who knows, this time. See y’all later.”

Nupur followed her partner into her room, watching the sneakers turn corners to mark her path. When the door shut and the lights flickered to life, she drew in a deep breath and said, “Chantal is wrong.  _You_ are Zero.”

She could have known it before the First Hex, but her consciousness had failed her. She took in another deep breath and stated her proof.

“The Gale-Shapley algorithm solves the Stable Matching Problem by designating one side to propose to their preferred partners in order, and the partners can accept or reject based on their preference order,” she said. “But the rules didn’t tell us which side was which. That’s because _you_ hadn’t decided which was which. You were trying to hack the Stable Matching Problem.”

Something had stirred in her memory when Chantal complained about her bracelet. In the semiconscious haze that followed, she meditated over the computer program she had read before the game.

“Zero’s bracelet is programmed to overwrite whatever input is put in,” Nupur said. “Before the game starts, you tell the system what pairings you want to happen during the game. You let everyone else put in their preference lists, but the computer program would iterate through every possibility of preference list for you, including what would happen if one team did the proposing versus the other. And the configuration that allowed the game to be played the way you wanted… would be sent back to your bracelet… and that would determine the matches. You withheld your input to cheat the game.”

She was out of breath from saying so much. Her chest felt like fire as it heaved. She thought she could taste iron. She wondered if it was possible for the modified Stable Matching Problem to fail on the second iteration of matchmaking no matter what input Zero was assigned.

“It’s a brute force algorithm,” she mumbled. “It would be… O(N3)… really poor time complexity… but N equals six, so… it was practicable for… unless the other players gave… disagreeable input…”

Her mind was wandering.

“Ch… Chantal… said you… she was on the team with Selene and Ian. You swapped bracelets with her for… the reason she said. But her input… it sent back… It overwrote her input. She’s wearing your bracelet. You… are… Zero.”

The tears took an uncertain path down his weary face. For a time, they settled in the dark pockets between his pudgy, pitted cheeks and the eyes that had not seen enough sleep in months, perhaps years. It was not long before those bruised circles could not contain what fell into them, and the tears spilled out from the sides, wandering around acne and into scars. He faltered with his arms, arms that perhaps Nupur might have remembered, had everything not spiraled out of control. They twitched open, then fell hopelessly back to his sides.

“This wasn’t s-supposed to happen,” uttered Kyle. “You were n-never supposed to get hurt like this—I didn’t want—”

One leg buckled, then the other, then he was bowing his head to the concrete from his knees.

“I never should have brought you here. I just w-wanted to…” He shook his head, grasping his scalp. “I’m so sorry. This is all my f-fault.”


	11. N + 1ˢᵗ Hex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Hey just making sure** since I posted the 10th chapter really soon after the 9th because I was excited - I didn't get any comments on it (and I didn't think it was because I stunned y'all speechless)
> 
> if you haven't read the chapter called **The Stable Matching Hack**? you missed the Zero reveal???
> 
> just makin' sure. thanks all.

“Don’t accept the Hex. I can open the door whenever you want and that’ll trigger everyone else’s rooms.” Kyle stared at his feet. “We should… talk.”

They ignored the message on the wall. The two of them were done with the Hex Game.

**WELCOME TO THE SECOND HEX**

**The Password is Inside the Safe**

**36:06**

“Don’t accept the Hex. There might be a way to break this thing.”

Ian marched around the room in search of hidden items, while Lily rifled through the toolbox in search of a hint for the passcode. She pressed her fingers and thumbs firmly against every object to keep them from shaking, but her heart felt like it was shaking inside her chest.

“I think this isn’t about the safe itself,” murmured Ian. “What do you think’s tougher to crack, a safe or a door lock?”

“Oh,” said Lily with a shiver.

“All I need’s a couple credit cards and an Exact-O knife,” he muttered. “It’s a shit lock. I could break it, no sweat, fifteen minutes tops.”

When Ian saw the tears clogging up her eyes later on, she would shake her head and say that the Game was starting to get to her, she was just feeling overwhelmed with the stress of it all.

 

Chantal gave a hearty kick to the safe bolted into the ground. “It’s the real deal. Really wants us to break into the safe, far as I know.”

“So you came here from the future just to be a fucking idiot all over again?”

“You don’t have to tell me that. I already know.” She thumbed over her shoulder at the red button. “I think I was with Lily last time, and she couldn’t find anything. No gimmicks. Sooner we hit this, the better.”

Selene thrust out her hand to strike the button with the heel of her palm. The room turned red as the women locked eyes.

“S’gonna be about twenty minutes, if it’s like last time,” said Chantal.

Selene nodded without moving her eyes or her hand. “Swell.”

**YOU HAVE ACCEPTED THE HEX**

**UNKNOWN TIME REMAINING**

“Gave us _nothing_ to work with,” Ian grumbled, glancing at the camera in the corner of the room to prove himself to whomever was on the other side. “This isn’t fair.”

Lily wanted to follow Kyle’s instructions. She wanted to be helpful, to lose herself in a puzzle for the next fifteen minutes. She did not want to sit in a dark, red room with a murderer.

“We’re halfway through our time limit, aren’t we?” he groaned. “And we still have no idea what’s going on here. Chantal acts like she knows everything, but nothing she’s saying is useful. Still doesn’t explain anything.”

Lily nodded.

“What about you? Chantal’s pretending she’s psychic or whatever, but you know something more about the Game than the rest of us, right?”

“It’s from a video game I played,” she mumbled.

Her face had lost affect. She could barely move her lips to speak. She felt like she had just come down from a panic attack, but she could not remember where the panic started and ended.

“You remind me of someone I used to know,” he said. “She was into video games and puzzles and stuff like you are. Her name was Sarah. Sarah Anderson.”

Lily nodded dumbly. She remembered what Ian had said about this person being the “meek, asocial type”. She lacked the energy or the evidence to fight that assessment.

Ian waited another moment before muttering, “So you _don’t_ know her.”

She furrowed her brow. The surname stuck out to her only after the fact, but her face and her mind were so numb that she did not betray a reaction.

“Those other kids are too young to know her, I thought,” he said. “And Chantal was the one who told me she was wrapped up in the game, so I figured it couldn’t be her. The whole accomplice thing, I mean. It obviously wouldn’t be Selene, either, since she’s the one Sarah’s trying to catch.”

Lily lacked the energy to ask the question aloud. An interested raise and curious tilt of her head did the trick.

“Don’t freak out—and don’t say anything either, but, uh…” He sighed. “Selene kind of… killed someone. A friend of ours, actually. It was an accident, but… it was getting dicey, they were starting to suspect all of us, and we all had to cover her ass. Well, maybe everyone else really thought she didn’t do it, but I… I was dating her at the time, so I could read her. And it looks like Sarah’s onto her.”

The words sank like stones as soon as they came through Lily’s ears. She stared at Ian and did not believe a single one.

Ian winced. “Yeah, I know that sounds like bullshit, but… depending on how Zero plays this, you might see some proof soon as the Hex is over.”

Almost as if on cue, the projector started to flicker with moving pictures. And then Lily did not know what to believe.

 

“You were with Ian last round, right?” Selene said. “And he wasn’t throwing a tantrum, so… you probably didn’t see it. Kyle and Lily might’ve, though.”

Chantal had been rocking back and forth against the wall to wait out the duration of the Hex, but she froze when Selene brought this up. “See what?” she asked.

“This… video,” Selene sighed. “About…”

“Wait, you saw a video, too?!”

Selene’s eyes went wide. “Shit,” she uttered. “What… what did you see?”

“No, you first,” Chantal said.

She winced. “It was about… Tim,” she said hesitantly. “News clips from when they were suspecting us of… y’know. All that shit.”

“Yeah, same,” Chantal breathed.

“Wait, but Ian didn’t flip out?”

“No, it was… wait.” Chantal folded her arms. “How did yours end?”

Selene folded her arms, too, but while Chantal was confrontational, Selene was defensive. “With an audio clip of Ian bragging about how he once picked a door lock and got away with it,” she muttered. “Y’know, like the lock on the shed door that fucking exonerated us.”

Chantal felt her stomach begin a descent that lasted for at least the next three minutes, just constantly sinking. “Fuck,” she exhaled. “Ours ended with a clip of you doing that suplex thing on… on somebody. The thing we all knew you could probably do but, y’know, didn’t tell the police about when they said Tim had a head injury and started accusing us.”

Selene flinched. “They’re… they’re fucking with us, right?” she could barely say. “M-maybe Kyle and Lily saw something that… that framed _you_ …”

“It’s Sarah,” Chantal stated. “Sarah Anderson is fucking with us. She’s still not satisfied.”

She flinched again, with a more violent jerk this time. “That’s who you think is Zero?” she uttered.

“Yeah. Her name was—”

The screen flickered.

“This shit again!” Selene screamed over the sound of the reporter beginning a story about the Timothy Anderson case. “This fucking video!”

Chantal did not recognize the part where the blonde woman rambled on about door locks, but Selene did. And together, they listened to the audio.

 

Though the reels ended with a different message this time, they had seen these words before, just prior to entering this room.

**THE HEX GAME WILL END WHEN A CONFESSION IS MADE**

 

“Okay,” Kyle sighed, having punched in the PIN. “Let’s finish this. Let’s win the Hex Game.”


	12. Nessun Dorma

Kyle glanced over his shoulder when the next Hex Room door opened and gave a tired nod of acknowledgement to Ian and Lily as they emerged.

“You guys bust open the safe or something?” Ian asked. “We were only in there for… seven minutes, looks like.”

He judged it by the timer on the wall.

**END OF SECOND HEX**

**29:10**

“We just guessed at the PIN. She got it after a few tries.” Kyle shrugged. “It was some play on the number six.”

“7776. Six to the fourth power,” she mumbled. “Or… squared, twice. For the Second Hex, I guess.”

Lily saw herself in their lifeless eyes. Unlike Ian, all three of them were dead inside, going numb to a reality that rushed at them faster than their young minds could grapple with it.

“So what happens now?” Ian asked. “We got a half-hour left, and we went through all the rooms. What’s next, the bathroom?”

Nupur glanced at Kyle. Kyle looked at the floor.

“I guess we… try to figure out who Zero is,” Lily murmured.

Kyle nodded, still staring at the floor.

After an awkwardly quiet minute, save for Ian’s occasional conversational remarks that got no response, the door to the final Hex Room finally opened. Then, everyone started talking at once.

Ian straightened his spine and gave a confident sneer. “’Bout time you guys made it out of—”

“Ian, three of us gotta talk, this is—”

“It’s on a fucking timer, you—”

“ _Kyle is Zero!_ ”

Nupur screamed louder than she had ever raised her soft voice in her life. No one missed it, and no one missed the violent stagger Kyle took away from her, clutching his chest as if feeling the stab of betrayal in his heart. His eyes had more guilt than a dog’s when he slowly moved his gaze to the four pairs of eyes staring daggers into him.

“You’re… you’re kidding, right?” Chantal uttered.

Ian waited for a single second of silence to pass without Kyle denying his identity. It was as good a confession as any. He raced across the room towards the keypad beside the Number 6 Door.

“ _Wait_ , Ian,” Kyle ordered.

His voice had gone so dark that it made Ian hesitate. Zero’s personality possessed the young man’s body, turning his stare into something burning and frigid at the same time. He turned that stare to Lily.

“On a scale from one to no fucking way,” said Zero, “how unlikely is it that my real name is Kyle?”

Lily’s dead eyes went wide.

“You’re bluffing,” Ian accused.

“N-no, he’s not,” Lily insisted, her voice trembling. “Kyle is—that’s th-the name of a—it’s a character i-in the—”

“Put in Kyle if you want.” Zero shrugged. “It’s your life on the line.”

“There’s nothing in these bracelets!” Ian shouted, but he still would not type the name. “You’re _still_ bluffing!”

“Chantal, is there something in the bracelets?” Zero asked.

She picked up her jaw from the floor and managed a nod.

“So we play out the rest of this game on my terms,” said Zero.

Ian bared his teeth and clenched his fists. A single glance at Selene was the only thing holding him in place. He had twice seen what would happen if she stepped in to stop him.

“I _will_ tell you my name,” Zero promised. “You’re going to win this game. I just need to get what I want first.”

“How old are you?” Chantal asked. The question spilled unbidden from her lips, but she could no longer believe that he was the sixteen-year-old boy she had believed him to be.

He gave her a sidelong glance and a small nod. “Twenty-four. We’ll get into that later,” he said. “So everyone here now knows about the murder of Timothy Anderson.”

“It was a suicide!” Ian yelled.

“It was a murder, and someone in this room murdered him,” Zero stated. He pointed without looking to the camera perched in the upper corner of the ceiling. “All I want is for someone to say it so this fucking mess can finally be over.”

“Did Sarah tell you all this horseshit?!” Ian demanded. “You can’t tell me you _believe_ —there’s something wrong with her, she’s—”

“There was a lot wrong with… Sarah,” he mumbled. For a moment, his façade broke into something vulnerable and deeply tragic. “This… has nothing to do with… her. She’s dead to me.”

“You’re not going to give us your name until someone confesses,” Chantal said. “So… the thing in the rules about the confession…”

Zero smiled.

“Who says you’ll even give us a real name if we do what you say?” Ian said. “Your bracelet won’t inject _you_. There’s no way you rigged this game to kill yourself. You could give us a fake name, watch us type it in like fucking idiots, and just walk away.”

“Nupur,” said Zero. “Or Chantal. You figured it out, too.”

In Nupur’s hazy memory of a previous game, Zero had done exactly what Ian was suspecting. He had fed the players Nupur’s name to bring it to a premature end.

“But… that’s not his bracelet,” she realized. “His… Chantal is wearing Zero’s bracelet. And Zero is wearing Chantal’s.”

Chantal’s eyes went wide. “Oh, shit.” She stared at her bracelet, a harmless toy on her wrist. “Oh… oh, _shit_.”

“If I tell you the wrong thing, it’s my life on the line, too,” he said. “Maybe my life has been on the line a couple of times already, in all of the alternate universes, and I just don’t remember those.”

“We’re not fucking universe-hopping,” Ian spat. “That’s bullshit.”

“Yeah, it is. Sorry. Just a convenient phrase.” He shrugged. “I guess that’s a good place to start, what’s really going on here.”

He glanced at the projector to see how much time he had left himself. They had almost twenty-seven minutes.

“There was a hint I gave when I talked about the opera in the game Chantal remembers, but the rest of you haven’t heard it, since she decided it wasn’t important,” he said. “The big aria from _Turandot_ is called _Nessun Dorma_ , which means _none shall sleep_. In the opera, none shall sleep until they find the name of the prince. In the Hex Game, it means no one is going to die.”

Selene went from passive to fuming in the blink of an eye. She lifted her left hand, balled into a shaking fist, and jabbed her finger at the bracelet. “Then what the fuck is this?!” she demanded. “You said there’s really poison in here!”

“It can be toxic, if you take too much,” he responded, and that shut her up again. “It’s just an anesthetic. The kind they use to make you lose your memory of a surgery. So every time you wake up and the Hex Game starts again, you think you’re here for the first time.”

He pointed at the keypad Ian was already leaning towards.

“Guess if you want,” he said. “You won’t die. But you’ll all forget I’m Zero.”

“Chantal won’t forget,” Lily said.

“And you’ll all definitely trust Chantal when you wake up and have no idea what’s going on and she starts explaining everything,” Zero replied with a sly grin. “How soon you forget, even without the drugs.”

“Wait, but what’s the deal with the espers?” Chantal demanded. “How come I can remember some of the other games? And then Nupur remembered one I didn’t!”

Zero smirked. “Let’s walk through the whole sequence of events,” he said. “How we got here. To the fourth Hex Game.”

“Fourth,” Lily mouthed in disbelief. It was consistent with the number of games Chantal and Nupur claimed to remember, but to hear the number stated aloud was another thing entirely, knowing that their bodies had unwittingly played out the game that many times.

“The first and second Hex Games were pretty similar,” said Zero. “No one knew anything about the game. We started with codenames and we dropped them after the First Hex when we found out that Zero’s name was the password. The only thing I wanted to be different was who was going to end up with Nupur during the Second Hex.”

Chantal wracked her brain for the memory. When Selene had emerged from the Hex Room, she attacked Ian, leaving him unconscious on the floor. Nupur had been behind her, silently weeping.

“You showed her the murder reel,” Chantal realized. “The, the video that said Ian’s the murderer. You tricked Selene into attacking him.”

Zero flashed a thumbs-up at his waist level, though his expression remained lifeless. “What you don’t remember,” he said, “is I tricked _you_ into attacking him in the first game. I cheated at the matching algorithm to make sure you and Nupur would get matched in the Second Hex for the first Hex Game, and at the end of the Hex, I just gave a message that said Ian was a murderer. If you were wondering how you got that massive bruise on your face, it’s because you believed it, and you tried to take him down, and you got your ass handed to you.”

Chantal could only nod, because that sounded completely plausible.

“Why did you match them with me?” Nupur asked.

“Because you wouldn’t be able to help,” he answered. “You’re small. You’re not only small, you’re timid, and you’re not confident in yourself. You were there to force the other player’s hand, basically, even if they were the _real_ murderer, because they couldn’t very well give that as an excuse for why they weren’t going to confront Ian.”

He had tricked Selene and Chantal into attempting to take down a grown man and captured the result on video.

“You’re trying to _prove_ who did it,” Chantal realized.

“The Second Hex didn’t always have a safe,” Zero said with a nod. “First it was just the lock, and a message that says you’ve seen the lock before, and you know how to open it. Lily talked about espers enough for everyone to think that it was about needing to repeat the game. I figured one of you would know the PIN from when you opened my brother’s shed and try that, but… that’s when I got Ian’s audio clip. Which everyone’s heard but Ian, by this point.”

Ian froze, staring around the room at the eyes boring into him. “What audio clip?” he demanded.

“You said you needed credit cards and a knife to cut them, and you’d be able to pick a lock,” Selene said, folding her arms. “And that you did it before. To pull a prank on a friend. That he… didn’t. Take. Well.”

Ian flinched. “Oh, fuck, no,” he uttered. “No, no, that was—fuck, you guys wouldn’t remember! It was with Bryan, way back before—it was stupid shit, it was really just a prank, I swear to God.”

“I didn’t exactly want to give out knives in the Hex Rooms,” Zero continued, as if he could not hear Ian speaking. “Then it turned out Ian brought his own to the party and tried to kill everyone at the end of the first game, after Chantal couldn’t bring him down. Another great clip to add to the collection of incriminating evidence. I could’ve put that one in the murder reel, but I figured it was so over-the-top that no one would even believe it. Besides, Chantal remembers it well enough, apparently.”

Chantal nodded. The memory was fading with time, but she remembered the knife coming out of Ian’s pocket.

“So, second Hex Game, and I gave you a toolbox and told you to crack a safe, just like this one,” said Zero. “But in the second game, I left out some gift cards, too. And sure enough, Ian picked the lock. All on video.”

“It was for Bryan’s,” Ian protested still.

“There was also the puzzle for the First Hex,” Zero added. “I thought it was kind of obvious, but no one seemed to notice. The IV injection into the dummy arm.”

Chantal felt sick to her stomach.

“I don’t think the news clips I picked out mentioned it,” said Zero, “but that’s how… that’s how Tim Anderson died. He was injected with an overdose of an anesthetic. Similar kind to what’s in your bracelet, actually.”

“Look, buddy, I don’t know who you were to him, or who you are to Sarah, or whatever,” said Ian, “but… he injected himself, alright? It’s been two damn years and I still don’t wanna believe it, but that’s what happened. I’m sorry.”

“You and Selene gave pretty clean injections,” Zero said with a shrug. “Chantal got the job done well enough for the puzzle, but not well enough to kill somebody. So that narrowed things down to two.”

“Ian’s right, dude,” Selene cut in. “This isn’t—this won’t fix anything. Even if someone… it’s not going to fix anything.”

“Sure, it won’t fix anything,” said Zero, “but it’ll be satisfying as all hell.”

“So you were resetting the game to set up different challenges for them,” Lily said. “And each iteration of the game was reactive to the one previous. You were trying to narrow down who did it by proving they _could_ have done it, even though the police thought they couldn’t.”

“Yeah, you hit it right there, Lily,” Ian said. “You’re proving we _could_ , not that we _did_. You’re ignoring the fact that we were his best friends.”

“Wouldn’t be my only mistake in the game design,” sighed Zero. “I forgot to account for the fact that one of my players is a pothead.”

Ian and Selene snapped their heads towards Chantal, who stood dumbfounded under Zero’s gaze.

“There weren’t supposed to be espers. If anything, I was supposed to be the only ‘esper’, because I’d be the only one who know what was happening the whole time,” he admitted. “But weed fucks with your tolerance to anesthetics.”

Her jaw jutted forward before it fell. “ _That’s_ why I remember everything?”

“Tell your doctors if you ever get surgery, because you need a double dose to forget shit, apparently. I reprogrammed your bracelet after the second Hex Game, so you don’t remember the third,” Zero explained. “So you also don’t remember the other anesthetic fuckup I made. Nupur’s.”

Nupur had lowered herself to the floor again to soothe her spinning head. For a moment, she wondered what Zero had miscalculated, but in her heart and her queasy stomach, she knew what was wrong.

“Between the first and second Hex Games, Nupur went from not remembering how she agreed to help me with the Hex Game,” said Zero, “to not remembering a goddamn thing about her life.”

Ian stormed towards her. “You _agreed_ to—”

“She doesn’t fucking _remember_ , you piece of shit!” Zero shouted. “I… I upped her dose to make her forget. And I fucked up. The anesthetic’s been fucking her up more every game, even though I started lowering it. She didn’t even wake up in time for the start of the third one.”

Nupur only remembered the end of the game, and even that memory had massive blanks.

“The third game was the shortest one. We never even made it to the First Hex,” Zero said. “I set up a lot of things differently. At the end of the second game, after Selene took down Ian, she asked for rope to restrain him, so I gave her rope in the beginning of the third game. Soon as her bracelet detected consciousness, I had the projector give her a message to tie up players Q1 and Q3, which used to be me and Lily. I picked myself so I could test the strength of the restraints, and I picked someone else so that the camera could have an impartial player genuinely trying to escape. And you did it. You proved you could have taken down Tim Anderson and tied him up and he’d’ve been helpless.”

A bead of sweat rolled down Selene’s pale cheekbone just as Chantal looked her way.

“But then the timer hit zero and the Hex Game started, and Nupur was still out cold,” said Zero. “And Chantal was doing her esper talk. She mentioned knowing the password was Zero’s name, so I said I knew who Zero was, and I fed her a fake name. I set a couple of passwords for emergencies, and one of them was Nupur’s password. That one triggers everyone’s bracelets but hers.”

“That’s when I woke up,” Nupur whispered.

He nodded. “Forced me into a tight spot, waking up when you did,” he said. “You were going to learn too much, Chantal remembered too much, and Lily came into this whole thing already knowing too much. I knew I had to get you all on the same team so you wouldn’t talk to each other. So after I cut myself free from the ropes with Ian’s knife”—he pointed at the pile of severed rope—“I had to untie Lily”—he pointed to the intact rope—“and then I had to swap bracelets. What I would’ve liked to do was swap Nupur and Lily with Ian and Selene, so I could keep my bracelet, but Nupur was gone. So I risked it. I gave my bracelet away.”

“So if we type in Nupur’s password, we can save Nupur and Chantal,” Lily said.

“We could type in _anything_. I’d get you guys out of here no matter what,” Chantal pointed out. “The Number 6 Door opens between games, right? That’s how Nupur got out. Plus, you had to bring in new puzzles and shit. So I could bust outta here and call the police and—”

“Nupur, what happened when you left through the Number 6 Door?” Zero asked. “At the end of the third Hex Game.”

Nupur remembered the three doors in the dark hall. One had a window of light that led outside, but the handle would not turn.

“There’s another door outside this one,” she said. “That one only unlocks when we truly win the game, doesn’t it?”

Zero nodded.

“The IDs!”

The idea burst from Chantal’s lips with such a force that her whole body shook, and she took a clumsy step to rebalance herself. She saw Zero’s eyes go wide with what she hoped was fear.

“Nupur found everyone’s stuff outside the chamber,” she explained. “I’ll—I’ll find that, and I’ll get your stuff, and I’ll find your name, and—”

“Nupur already found my ID. That’s _definitely_ not the password.”

It took a long while for the realization to settle into Chantal’s head. In that time, Zero explained himself to everyone else.

“Really?” His eyebrows twitched upwards. “I thought as soon as we brought my deadname back, you would’ve made the connection.”

“Deadname?” Lily repeated. After her lips pressed together to make the M of the last syllable, they pulled apart and hung open. She knew the social context for that word.

His hair was shorter now, of course, and his face was not round and smooth like it used to be. But his eyes, though tired, were the same as ever. Just as Chantal had suspected since the beginning, Zero was investigating the death of their brother. Her only mistake was the name.

Selene shook her head furiously. “You’re not Sarah,” she said. “You _can’t_ be.”

“No, I’m not,” said Zero. “I never want to hear that name again, actually, thanks.”

“No!” Ian made a face comically distorted by disbelief as he gestured at Zero’s masculine appearance. “The fuck happened to you?!”

“There was something wrong with me. Like you said,” he replied. “So I went to therapy and got drugs.”

“You turned yourself into a… a _dude_ , just for this?!”

Zero lost his smile. “I was always a dude, _dude_ ,” he retorted. “I made myself this way for me. The Hex Game was secondary.”

Ian started for the Number 6 Door. “Then the true name is—!”

The creases of anger in Zero’s face deepened. “ _Fuck_ you,” he growled. “That’s _not_ my true name. That name was the garbage I wore for twenty-three years because I thought I _had_ to.”

“Then what the fuck is your true name supposed to be?!” Ian demanded.

Zero tapped his temple twice. “It’s here,” he said, then pointed to the keypad, “and it’s there. It’s the name I chose for myself and never said out loud. _Il nome suo nessun saprà_.”

For all of the missteps he had made along the way, Zero had at least managed to set a perfect trap at the end of his games. He did not yet know who his prey was, but he had orchestrated their seamless capture nonetheless. A grin twitched onto his nervous lips as he watched them succumb to it.

“ _Vincerò_ ,” he almost laughed. “ _Vincerò._ ”

They did not know Italian, but the self-satisfied way he said it was translation enough.

“ _Vincerò._ ”

Chantal gritted her teeth. “This isn’t fair.”

“Jesus _fuck_ , how is this not fair?!” Zero snapped. “You wanna know what’s unfair?! A twenty-seven-year-old guy getting murdered by the people he lived with and never getting justice for it because they covered each other’s asses!”

“No! There _wasn’t_ a murder!” Chantal shot back. “Ian and Selene wouldn’t do this! We were _friends_!”

“Tim didn’t leave the apartment without his contacts, give himself a fucking concession, then hide in his shed and fucking _inject_ himself with a lethal dose of anesthetics,” Zero retorted. “One of you made the injection. I know everything that happened up until that point, but I don’t know whether it was Ian or Selene who made the injection. I want to know who killed him. Then you get my name, fair and fucking square.”

“You’re _forcing_ us to make a confession,” Ian said, pointing his finger at Zero like a gun. “We can’t get out unless we confess. You’re submitting flimsy evidence with no motive. This is a witch trial.”

“Well, then, call me a witch, and may God save my soul,” said Selene in a strained voice, “because I’m not feeling forced at all.”

Chantal’s face spelled out horror and betrayal, but it was Ian’s reaction that was much more interesting. There was the moment as the words sank in where his face flushed red with pent up fury. His whole body jerked with a motion towards her, an instinct to fight, until that memory of her flipping him over his head came back to mind. He stopped in his tracks, his knuckles white.

“Selene, no, no, you didn’t,” Chantal breathed, bringing her shaking hands to her face.

“I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t make the injection. But …”

She pressed the heel of her palm to her eye. She wore that strained, broken smile of someone losing the fight against her tears.

“Isn’t that bad enough?” she could barely say. “Everything I _did_ do.”

Chantal was the last one to take a step back from her. Ian moved first, almost tripping over himself. Lily leaned before her foot staggered to catch her. Nupur picked herself halfway off of the ground to increase the distance between them.

“Wh—who?” Ian demanded. “Who killed him, then?!”

Rage filled her eyes, forcing out the tears. She whirled around to face him, leading with the momentum of a fist aching to strike his flesh and bone.

“Don’t you _fucking dare_ , you fucking psychopath!” she screamed, her mouth stretched wide enough to make her words as loud as her hate. “You told me to do this! You _made_ me do this! You guilted me and told me you were gonna get deported if we didn’t do it exactly how you said!”

They were quicker to take steps back from Ian. A wave of heat came off of him as Selene made her accusation. Though the lust for retribution burned in his entire being, he could not attack, not with the tiny sentinel just as ready to fight back.

“What the hell are you talking about?!” he shouted.

“Give it up, you sick fuck!” she yelled. “You’re an illegal immigrant, and all your US documents are your own forgeries, and you run a business selling fake IDs for college kids, and Tim threatened to report you when he found out, because he wanted you to be _better_ than that, and you fucking _killed_ him for it!”

Anger possessed Ian’s long, lean body. He shot towards Selene with the energy of the compressed fury within him. Zero’s hand dove into the pocket of his jeans and came out with the knife he had stolen from Ian after the second Hex Game. Before he could start to make a threat to stop Ian in his tracks, Selene protected herself. Her hate was not as volatile as his, but it was deeper and heavier. It held her rooted to the ground during the charge. When he came near, she sank low and ripped his legs out from under him with the rush of her weight at his knees.

He caught himself against the ground with a hand and an elbow. Selene did not allow him to spring back to his feet. Balanced on her hands and one foot, she swung her leg around in an arc, heel out, until she slammed it down against Ian’s back. The blow itself bought her enough time to perch herself on top of him, one shoe against each tricep.

“ _Ow, fuck!_ Your _heels_! Get the fuck _off_ , you’re _hurting_ me!”

Selene dug her heels in harder. She tangled her fingers into his grungy hair and held his cheek to the concrete.

“Don’t fucking drag me into this!” he shouted. “I didn’t—!”

“I’ll fucking drag you,” she snarled. Her hair fell into her face as she bent over to speak directly into his ear. “You dragged me into this first. I’m dragging you back.”

“ _Don’t listen to her!_ ” he begged the other players.

“It went from, ‘Can you take Tim and pick me up from work?’” she said, mocking his voice, “and when I told you Tim didn’t want to go, you said, ‘I’m gonna play a prank on Tim, don’t tell him what’s up,’ and then it went to, ‘if you don’t get him in your car before I get off work, I’m gonna get fucking deported, so do it even if that means you have to fucking knock him out and _kidnap_ him,’ and then you were there with your fucking—fucking _syringe_ —and you said it was j-just enough to w-wipe his memories, just g-get him to f-forget about your s-stupid—”

“She’s making this shit up!” Ian yelled over her breaking voice. “I _never_ —!”

The panic in his eyes did not compel them. There was something that seemed at first animalistic about it, perhaps the wildness of his shaking stare. But this was not quite reminiscent of captured prey. His was a very human expression, because it was rooted in evil.

“Selene,” said Chantal on the hot rush of air from a held breath, “you telling the truth?”

Tears stuck in the spaces between her eyelashes when she lifted her head. “Every word,” she swore.

“Ian has four IDs in his wallet with four different names.” Nupur locked eyes with Selene and nodded. “I believe you.”

“ _No!_ No, _fuck_ , listen to me!” Ian screamed. “Why are you believing _her_ and not _me_?!”

It was hard to take his question seriously, when desperation coated every inch of his face, seeped into every word, and filled the sweat running down his skin.

“Because we’re fucking humans,” Zero retorted, “even if _you’re_ not.”

He managed to speak without stuttering, but he was shaken and pale. Everything in the game was supposed to lead up to this confession. He had already pinpointed the roommates responsible for his brother’s death. It still shook him to the core not only to have it confirmed before his very eyes, but also to realize the effect that Timothy Anderson’s death had had on even his murderers.

Selene was lost in a hate that was not reserved solely for Ian. So much of it—perhaps _more_ of it—was for herself. She did not feel fully redeemed by becoming a cold agent of justice, delivering herself and her partner to judgment. For two years, she had survived by compartmentalizing her deeds away where she would only visit them in nightmares. This small act, and the small speck of self-respect it gave her, allowed her to look her crimes in the eye for the first time since the tragedy occurred.

Ian was different, but much the same. He, too, had tucked away the murder into the back of his mind for the past two years, not because it brought him pain and guilt, but because he had internalized it, justified it, and moved on.

“I don’t know if he’s the only person you’ve killed,” uttered Selene, “but I know you _would_ kill again, you abso-fucking-lutely _would_. You’re just… _missing_ some moral value, somewhere. You prioritize yourself over anyone and anything else, no holds barred.”

“Oh my fucking _God_ , I don’t wanna hear bullshit psychoanalysis from my ex-girlfriend!” he groaned. “That’s not even—who else is gonna look out for me if I don’t?! _Fuck_ you!”

“You don’t even feel remorse!” she shrieked. “You think it was perfectly acceptable to _kill_ someone because he got in your way! That’s how your fucking _head_ works!”

“Okay, I think we’ve heard enough,” said Zero.

Ian gave one last wriggle to attempt to free himself, but Selene would never relent. Zero bounced the fluorescent ceiling light off of the knife’s blade and into Ian’s eyes to get him to stop.

“Since someone obviously isn’t going to confess, no matter how much evidence we pile on him…” Zero sighed and closed his eyes. “ _Il mio nome e la vita insiem ti dono_. My name is Cal Anderson. Password is Cal, C-A-L.”

The other players were too stunned to move at first. Nupur preferred not to stand, and Ian and Selene were otherwise engaged, so it was up to Lily and Chantal to decide who would have the honor of punching in the password to the Number 6 Door.

“’Nother opera line?” Chantal asked, nodding Lily towards the keypad.

Cal stared at his feet. “The prince’s line to Turandot right before he tells her his name,” he said. “ _I give you my name and my life together_.”

She was about to call him out on the drama when the lights flicked out and the projector screen went red. Lily gave a yelp.

“I put in ‘Cal’! C-A-L!” she squeaked. “I—I don’t know what’s—what did I do wrong?!”

“Nothing,” said Cal, glancing at the projection. “ _È l’ora della prova._ ”

Chantal did not have to ask for a translation this time. It was written in white against red on the wall before her.

**IT IS THE HOUR OF THE TRIAL**

“Trial?!” Ian roared. “This isn’t a _trial_! This isn’t fair! This is—”

“Does this look like a courthouse, motherfucker?” Cal snapped.

A short explanation appeared on the slide before he finished speaking.

> I have one last request before the Number 6 Door opens.
> 
> Q-Type players: Thank you for participating in the Hex Game. I have one last request for you. It is up to you to determine which of the A-Type players should be held responsible for the death of Timothy Anderson. Press the corresponding buttons on your watch to make your selections and press the side button to submit. If a player receives two or more votes, they will be injected with anesthetic so that they may be more easily detained once the chamber is open.
> 
> A-Type players: Do not beg.
> 
> \- Cal

Chantal’s eyes shot to Selene when she finished reading. Selene had no reaction other than to hold one of her hands over Ian’s eyes in case he could make out the smaller writing from where he stood. She accepted her position with grace.

“There’s an unanticipated twist here,” said Cal. “I set this up because I didn’t know which of the roommates was the culprit until we started playing the games. We’d all vote at the end to… settle everything, and it would be done.”

The former roommates used to comprise the team of A-Type players, but Zero had shifted bracelets between games to isolate the esper, Chantal, from Nupur, the survivor of the third Hex Game. In this configuration, Cal became an A-Type player. Zero himself was among the culprits on trial.

“It’s your lucky day.”

The knife fell with a ringing clatter against the concrete when he dropped it while raising his hands, palms open.

“You get to decide _my_ fate, too,” he said. “ _È l’ora della prova. Non la temo._ ”

He shifted his gaze uneasily between Nupur and Chantal, who were giving him long, hard stares from over their bracelets.

Lily had already made her decision regarding him, and turned to Selene. “You’re on video confessing everything,” she said. “You’ll… cooperate after all this, right? There’s no reason we’d have to… to _drug_ you.”

Selene shrugged. “That’s the plan, but… but if you don’t trust me, I get it,” she mumbled. “Do whatever. I’m not gonna beg.”

“The fuck is going on,” Ian sputtered.

“Good things,” sighed Selene. “All good things.”

The explanation of the trial vanished from the projection when all of the votes were cast. The selected bracelets were not listed on screen, because the players’ reactions were indication enough of who had been indicted.

Ian gave a strangled cry as his right hand twitched towards his left, but Selene’s grip would not let them reach. His left arm writhed within its limited range of motion as he screamed, “ _No! No! No!_ ” until his last waking breath.

Selene watched his reaction in awe, and stared at her own bracelet. She had felt nothing. She continued to feel nothing, even as Ian’s squirming became weaker and weaker.

Cal winced as the needles flooded his veins. He swallowed, nodded, and took a knee in anticipation of his approaching weakness.

“ _No!_ Why?!” Lily screeched when she saw him. She turned to Nupur and to Chantal as if she herself had been betrayed. “He was doing this to catch a murderer! Everything he did was—!”

“Still way fucking illegal,” said Chantal with a stony, grim face. “You _knew_ you had at least one murderer in the room and you locked us all in with them. Your own brother died from an overdose of anesthetics and you came close to doing the same fucking thing to Nupur. That’s what did it for me.”

Nupur did not answer for her actions. Her eyes were locked on Cal, who winced and nodded again.

“I was never gonna be able to live with myself… after everything I did,” he said, his voice growing weaker. He caught his wavering body with a hand against the floor. “This is just… doing it for me. Thanks.”

Chantal’s eyes went wide. She slammed a foot forward. “Wait, what do you mean?!” she demanded. “You’re not—it’s just anesthetic, isn’t it?! It’s not poison!”

“It’s… _your_ dose… of anes… anesthetic,” he gasped. “Double… double dose… it’ll fuck me up, like… Nupur, if it… doesn’t… kill me.”

Chantal grabbed him by the shoulders when his eyes fluttered closed and he fell forwards. “ _Fuck_ that! Fuck _you_! You’re not fucking dying!”

His body was too heavy for her to hold. “ _Hai vinto tu_ ,” he whispered as he tumbled from her hands. “You’ve… won.”

With a click, the Number 6 Door came unlocked. Cal never heard it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few notes about the trans Zero twist, in case anyone thinks it came out of left field:
> 
>   * Cal mentioned being able to administer intramuscular injections during the severed arm puzzle. This is a way to take testosterone. Probably the biggest hint I dropped, but a hard one to pick up if you don't happen to also be a transmasc person (interested in) taking testosterone.
>   * Cal has a baby face, which is the gosh dang plight of young trans guys. He also has pretty bad acne, which is a common reaction to beginning testosterone because it's basically puberty. His voice also cracks all freaking game because it's still dropping. This only seems suspicious once you know he's twenty-four, but he spent the whole game letting everyone assume he was in high school.
>   * At the beginning of the final Hex Game, Cal started moving in his "sleep" as Nupur was talking about finding his outdated ID. Chantal noticed he had tears in his eyes. He kept his feelings in check for the rest of the game, but having to hear his deadname unexpectedly just kind of got to him the first time (not to mention the fear that Nupur would recognize him from the photo and out him).
> 

> 
> Translations/contexts for Zero's dramatic opera one-liners:  
> 
> 
>   * _Il nome suo nessun sapra_ : "No one knows his name." Sung by the chorus of townsfolk in the middle of the prince's big aria, _Nessun dorma_.
>   * _Il mio nome e la vita insiem ti dono_ : like Cal said, "My name and my life together, I give to you." The prince says his name to Turandot after this. His name is Calaf, actually! And his father's name is Timur. I... am bad at thinking of names........ so.............
>   * _È l’ora della prova_ : "It's the hour of the trial." Turandot says this when a bell at dawn rings or something. The prince has already told her his name, and then he says...
>   * _Non la temo_ : "I do not fear it." This is because Turandot has fallen madly in love with the prince overnight (opera plots, man)
>   * _Hai vinto tu_ : "You have won." The prince to Turandot shortly after the above lines.
> 

> 
> Oh! And _vincèro, vincèro, vincèro_ are the last three lines of the aria _Nessun dorma_ and basically the most recognizable part of the entire opera and aria. It means "I will win, I will win, I will win." The prince sings it as he envisions morning light signalling his victory. If you Google vincero vincero vincero (1) it will suggest the third vincero after you type the first two and (2) you will find the most beautiful, victorious video of Pavarotti grinning as he sings the end of _Nessun dorma_ to wild applause, and I like to imagine that playing through Cal's head for the entire endgame, because all villains should have classical (preferably romantic) music accompanying their villainy.
> 
> This story has been a wild adventure in "write what you know" tying together video games, classical music, Python scripting, and being trans. I am 14k words short of goal and I have no idea how to fill that out. I may have to add more chapters beyond the one I was planning, and only by a very flexible definition of "planning".


	13. Il Principe Ignoto

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Il Principe Ignoto_ : "The Unknown Prince". It's what he's called in the libretto for Turandot.

“ _Dilegua, o notte! Tramontate, stelle!_ ”

Pavarotti cried to the heavens, willing them to open and reveal the sun. It was unmistakably Pavarotti. No other tenor’s voice was built for that aria the way Pavarotti’s was. Sung by anyone else, it was a rather unremarkable piece, especially for its era.

“ _Tramontate, stelle… All’alba vincerò!_ ”

There was something electric in the arpeggios of the strings and the swells of the brass as they anticipated the prince’s declaration of victory, as if the whole orchestra was ready for Pavarotti’s signature line.

“ _Vincerò… Vincerò!_ ”

“There’s no fermata,” he found himself mumbling. “On the _cer_ … Puccini didn’t write a fermata… everyone just takes it now. But that’s not how the word’s pronounced.”

“Yeah, I know,” said a woman with a resounding voice. The speakers turned off with a click. “You say that every time, dude.”

He blinked his eyes open and found the brightness of baby blue hospital sheets on his legs, railings holding him in place. The tall shadow at his bedside, holding out her cell phone, had a face he had not seen in two years.

“Chantal?” he realized.

All of his work from the past five months came rushing at him. The construction of the chamber, with all of the electrical wiring. The puzzle ideas written on whiteboards, crossed out and circled and erased. The pages upon pages of pseudocode in his notebook, trying to rewrite the stable matching problem to suit his needs. Typing out _Cal_ for the first time and feeling peace in his heart. The names, faces, and addresses of the people he would invite to play his game.

“F-fuck, fuck, fuck!” Cal scrambled up the incline at the head of his hospital bed, ignoring the tug of cables and needles that held him in place. “What did I do?! Did I fuck up?!”

“I mean, sort of.” Chantal grabbed a book from his bedside. “Here.”

It was a composition notebook. It looked like his handwriting in the lines for the subject on the cover, but he did not remember writing it. The first line told him why he did not remember.

**ANTEROGRADE AMNESIA**

**(Hai vinto tu)**

“I’m getting real good at explaining everything real fast, if you want,” Chantal said with a shrug.

“Just like when you were the esper,” said someone else with a smile.

Context and the vague memory of the pictures he had found on her Tumblr told him she was Lily Nowakowski, the one he planned to be the third Q-Type player in his game. Her hair was an icy purple, just a bit lighter than the twists in Chantal’s hair.

“The game happened,” Cal realized. “I… I…”

He stared at the subtitle to his notebook. He had won.

“S’been… geez, only two weeks, hasn’t it? Feels like a month,” Chantal said. “Ian was arrested. Selene turned herself in. Local news is still going nuts.”

“ _National_ news is going nuts,” Lily added. “But the Hex Games flew under the radar. We destroyed the computer you ran the game on and dismantled the bracelets—well, Nupur did—and she’s got a backup of the game footage on an encrypted hard drive if we ever need the evidence.”

“We probably won’t,” said Chantal. “Ian doesn’t remember the Hex Game because we injected him, and Selene’s not talking about it to the police, far as we can tell. The rest of us… we decided you’ve suffered enough.”

She reached over the railing to flip open the cover of his composition notebook. His writing filled the first page.

> In ten minutes, you won’t remember writing this, but you did. You were injected with a high dose of the anesthetic at the end of the final Hex Game. But you won.

He caught only the first paragraph before she grabbed almost half of the pages in the book and flipped to some point near the middle.

> If I just write more and more about what happened to me—if I can find faster ways to say everything—maybe I’ll have a chance at five minutes of coherence. Like how the intro to Poe’s Murder Mystery Party had to explain the premise and everything that had happened since faster and faster
> 
> Why the fuck did I write about Poe’s Murder Mystery Party right after talking about how I needed to write more concise entries. The me who wrote above this was an idiot. Now I have no idea what’s going on.
> 
> It does feel like each time I wake up, I might be a different person from the last me who woke up. I’ll worry about different things. I’ll be in different moods. Maybe it has to do with what I’m told when I wake up. Maybe sometimes, no one is there to tell me anything, and I have to figure it out myself. The me who decided to write ANTEROGRADE AMNESIA on the cover was probably the best version of me to come out of this mess. Maybe I won’t get better, but I’ll figure out a way to be him every time I wake up.

 

The aftermath of the Hex Game was a debacle. Four women, one of whom could barely stand, had the unconscious bodies of two young men to contend with. Selene, however, barely had a problem piling Ian over her shoulders. She even held open the Number 6 Door as Lily and Chantal struggled with Cal together. Nupur clung to the walls, walking towards the light that she knew came from the door leading outside. Before they reached it, however, that door burst open.

The larger group of friends to which the roommates had belonged had grown and shrunk over the years, and their closeness to each other had fluctuated, too. Ian and Bryan went back the furthest, having been roommates in their freshman year of college together. Over the course of the year, they met Lucy, Ahmed, and Selene. They made fast friends with Tim and Chantal the next year, when the two were starting their own freshman years. Bryan kept in touch even after Chantal and Ian dropped out one after another, even when Selene buried herself in study for all of her four years in college. In the peak of their friendship, when Tim reunited with Ian and Chantal to live together as roommates, when Selene ended up in the same town a while after graduation and unexpectedly ended up dating Ian, they were playing video games online with Bryan every weekend. Ahmed would join when he could, and they would Skype with Lucy every now and then, but Bryan was still just as close with Chantal, Tim, and Ian as he had been back in college. For the past two years, Chantal had barely spoken with Bryan. Ian and Selene reported the same.

It was with only a flicker of surprise, then, that Chantal recognized the deep voice echoing down the hall as his.

“Chantal?!” he shouted. “Shit, are you totally immune to the anesthetic now?!”

Chantal turned her head over her shoulder to see Bryan’s strong silhouette piercing the light. “Nah, still only a little,” she replied.

“It said you voted A1 and A3,” he panted, hands on his knees. “Isn’t that you and Ian?”

“Oh, uh, no, that was Cal, actually. Things got complicated,” Chantal said, lifting her arms to raise her half of the young man into the light. “Shoulda guessed you were involved in this. Someone had to build this place.”

Bryan had taken a number of odd jobs over the years, including being a curator of an insect and reptile museum, but his most stable gig was as a co-owner and worker of a small company that specialized in remodeling homes. The one time he came up to visit the infamous apartment, he spackled a wall and secured a loose bathroom tile with grout because the supplies were already in his car. He maintained a joke collection of used Home Depot gift cards because it was all he would ask for on holidays. That was an easter egg no one had the memories to realize, not since Ian lost his.

“His name’s Cal, huh,” Bryan muttered. “Y’know, he didn’t even tell me. Didn’t want a chance _anyone_ would know. He had me call him Kyle for the past few months so he could get used to responding to it. Wait, let’s get your stuff before we head out—it’s in another room.”

As they laid down the bodies and made their way to the dark computer room, they fitted their understanding of events together. Bryan had a rudimentary phone application that gave him basic updates on the game—notifications when a game started or ended, passwords entered, the pairings determined for each game, and finally the bracelets that were voted against at the end of the game. Cal also sent him messages between games, asking for supplies and sending other updates over a restricted wireless connection they had set up together inside the compound. Bryan knew Chantal was an “esper”, and that the fourth Hex Game would likely be the last. In preparation, he had a large SUV waiting outside, engine running to keep the interior cool.

“We’re in the desert,” Lily said with a nervous laugh, squinting through the sunlight. “It’s _always_ the desert.”

Her grey-green eyes melted into hazel in the middle when her pupils contracted. The sun warmed their color. It might have been the heat, or the levity of freedom, but Chantal felt more infected by her hopeful smile.

Bryan glowed golden brown, with deeper, darker spots under his eyes. Despite the heat and despite his fatigue, he maintained his appearance as always. His pastel pink button-up was free of wrinkles, save for the creases between his muscles, and he had a perfect gradient in his haircut running from the nape of his neck to the level of his ears. He hoisted Cal into one of the two middle seats and belted him in. Selene did the same with Ian on the other side. She pressed her knuckles into his cheek to shove his head upright.

“So, since you all decided to knock this guy out,” Bryan said, “you probably have beef with me, too. But I’m your only ride out, so… you willing to put up with me?”

Chantal could not ignore the near-decade of friendship she had had with Bryan. It was one thing to resent Cal, whose face she barely recognized, and another to resent the man she had called her best friend for almost nine years. Selene had never known him so well, but she was not in a place to complain about criminals. Lily had never even wanted to accuse Zero of any wrongdoing, even before she knew who Zero was.

Nupur had nothing against an assistant of Zero’s, or even against the concept of Zero as the game master, even if he had made a mistake that could have taken her life. She had voted to anesthetize Cal because she did not want him to run away before her questions were answered.

 

“How did I help you with the Hex Game?” she asked. “You said I helped.”

“I _told_ you?” he uttered.

“I lost my memories, too,” she said. “My amnesia tended towards retrograde rather than anterograde. I’m not sure why it affected us differently.”

“What… what _happened_?” he wondered, holding his weary head.

She had answered this question of his twice already in the past forty minutes. She lacked the patience to give a third repetition. “How did I help you?” she asked again.

“Do you remember me?” he asked weakly. “It was… it was years ago, but…”

“I don’t remember much, Cal,” she said. “Just like you. I don’t remember how I helped you with the game.”

“Your research on different versions of the Stable Matching Problem,” he said. “I was… I was on your research team over the summer. One of the undergrads. You… you don’t remember me, because I… I used to… I was…”

“So I originally designed the algorithm you used in the Hex Game?”

“No, I… I asked you for help,” he said. “I asked for your thesis. I… that summer was… I had to leave before you finished your master’s, so…”

“That’s all?”

“No… remember? I asked… I asked more questions, didn’t I?” He was falling back into that state of confusion where he lost the thread of conversation and his head went blank again. “I said I wanted to design another modification for… for my own project. I asked you for help.”

“That’s quite a risk you took,” she murmured. “I could have put that together easily. Someone had asked me recently about the Stable Matching Problem, and then I saw it put into action during the game. Why did you bring me into the game when I had such a big hint as to who could be responsible?”

“You’re so smart, Nupur,” he sighed. “I’m not smart like you. I need somebody smart to help me figure this out. They outsmarted the police and detectives and stuff. I need you to help me figure out who did it. You’re so smart.”

“You caught them all by yourself, Cal,” she whispered.

“How… how do you know my name?”

“It’s alright. You can tell people to call you by your real name now. It’s all over.”

 

Chantal leaned forward in the backseat to hold her hand against Cal’s neck for the whole ride to the nearest hospital. Lily sat in the middle seat between her and Nupur, who fell asleep within minutes. When she leaned left, towards Lily, Lily leaned left, too. Chantal leaned right. When Lily fell asleep, Chantal finally felt a sense of victory.

She could see Bryan’s tight, controlled face in the rear view window. Selene sat beside him in the passenger seat. They were leaned away from each other, because Selene had to explain how she was an accomplice to Timothy Anderson’s murder.

“I don’t wanna be here anymore than you do,” she muttered.

“Yeah,” he grunted, gripping the steering wheel too tightly.

They did not speak to each other again.

 

The introduction to _Nessun dorma_ was often unrecognizable to even those who were familiar the aria. Frantic strings settled down from the terror of Princess Turandot’s ultimatum to her citizens until Pavarotti repeated the same words with glee.

“ _Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma…_ ”

“Works every time,” Chantal muttered, and the sound clicked out. “Play any other song and he just keeps sleeping. This one, he wakes right up.”

“Cal?” Lily asked. “Why did you pick me for the Hex Game?”

She had asked him this question three times already. But, like Zero, she wondered if, when the stage was reset, if she manipulated the scene a little differently each time, she could coax a different answer out of him.

“Fuck, fuck!” He went into a panic every time he saw the two previously unassociated young women together. “What happened?! _Fuck!_ ”

“We played the Hex Games already. It worked. You won,” she said. “But why did you pick me? Chantal, Ian, and Selene, I get, and I guess you knew Nupur, but… I never knew you. I’m a complete outsider. Why me?”

After they calmed him down, he gave the same answer for the fourth time. “D’you know,” he said, “if you follow your link to your original writing off of your fanfiction profile, and you go to the root domain, and you click on your résumé, your home address is right there?”

“You seriously picked me because I write fanfiction.”

“Because you write _smart_ fanfiction. Because you really know the lore,” he said. “So you need to be there to explain the rules if no one else gets it. You’re smart.”

Chantal laughed and elbowed her in the side. “You guessed it, Lil,” she teased. “You don’t remember it, but you _totally_ guessed it. Second game. I was there.”

Lily flushed red as Chantal hooked her arm over her shoulders and pulled her closer.

“Wait…are you…” Cal furrowed his brow and leaned forward. “Are you _dating_?”

“See? He figures it out faster every time!” Chantal whined, stamping her feet. “I swear, he’s getting better. The nurses say he’s keeping memories for about twenty minutes these days. That’s double from last week.”

He thought he remembered asking how long he had been here, but he did not remember the answer. There were two composition notebooks by his bedside table, both titled **ANTEROGRADE AMNESIA** , both filled with paragraphs of his scattered thoughts. It was indication enough.

“Nupur’s getting better, too,” Chantal said. “She’s still missing most of last year, last I heard, but everything else came back. She’s getting back into her job now, and she said it’s really jogging her memory.”

“Chantal, he doesn’t even remember what happened to Nupur,” Lily said quietly.

Chantal groaned. “God, we should just write up a goddamn poster in here, shouldn’t we?” she muttered. “Right on the wall in front of your bed. Anterograde amnesia, you won the Hex Games and no one else knows about them, Ian and Selene did it. Bam.”

“You didn’t even include anything about Nupur on the poster,” Lily pointed out. “And Selene didn’t exactly _do_ it.”

“Sounds like it’s all the same in the eyes of the law, if you believe what they’re saying on TV,” Chantal said. “She saved the texts from Ian from that day convincing her to go along with it without telling her it was murder, and it’s probably gonna save her ass so we don’t have to ask Nupur to bust out the Hex Game tapes and open a whole other can o’ worms. Fuck, I wanna hate her, but I can’t. I figured out how to hate Ian, but I can’t with Selene. I can’t just _hate_ her.”

Lily slid her hand over Chantal’s and gave a gentle squeeze.

“Bryan’s right there with me, though. At least I’ve got him to commiserate with,” Chantal sighed. “He’s the opposite, though. He can’t figure out how to hate Ian. I never really got along with Ian like Bryan did, but… Friends for a decade, you know that? Shit’s tough.”

“Chantal, just because Cal’s going to forget everything you say in twenty minutes doesn’t mean you can infodump on him like this.”

“She’s _sassy_ , dude. You know how shy she was during the game? She’s secretly a little ball of sass.”

“He _doesn’t_ know! Chantal!”

“C’mon! C’mon. C’mon, dude.” Chantal gripped his shoulder and gave it a shake, determination in her eyes. “You can remember. Get through this. Fight. You can beat this.”

“Am I dying?” he asked without a single drop of fear tinging his voice.

“You’re not living,” she said. “I wanna see you live. For Tim.”

“For Tim,” he repeated.

“Yeah. Keep writing. Keep remembering. Keep living for him.”

 

The pulse was slow and weak, but Chantal pressed her fingers deep enough to keep feeling it. As long as it did not disappear, as long as he kept breathing, she thought he would be okay.

“You know how long the anesthetic’s s’posed to last?” Chantal asked Bryan from the backseat. “For Ian, anyway. He’s not gonna wake up and start kicking and screaming, right?”

“He’s not gonna remember anything to kick and scream about,” Bryan replied. “Motherfucker’s gonna be out for an hour or two. We’ll be at the hospital in twenty minutes, then it’s a five minute drive to the local police.”

“I’m getting 4G back on my phone,” said Selene. “Googling the case. The quicker the cops know I’m serious, the better.”

Bryan drifted about a foot out of his lane over the course of the next few seconds, then righted himself with a swerve of the car that brought Lily closer to Chantal. Selene had already called ahead to the hospital when her phone was the first to get reception. Bryan had the number and address written on a Post-It on his dashboard, ready for an emergency similar to this one ever since he got the message from Cal after the first game that Nupur was reacting badly to the anesthetic.

“Where’d you get the funds for this shit, anyway?” Chantal asked.

“Tim had a life insurance thing from work and set it up in Kyle’s—in _Cal’s_ name. Probably thought he wasn’t gonna die before his mom,” Bryan replied. “About a year’s salary, I think, maybe year and a half. Cal held onto most of it till this.”

“He got anything left?” Chantal asked. “Hospital bills and all. And probably legal fees for a good lawyer.”

“I’m not gonna talk about whatever the fuck just happened back there, if that’s what you’re implying,” Selene called back over her shoulder. “Makes me look better if it didn’t take a fucking life-and-death escape game to make me finally come clean about all this, anyway.”

Bryan poured his fiery attention onto the road ahead to keep his car between the faded lines on the hot asphalt flying past.

“Looking good isn’t exactly gonna hold up in court,” Chantal said. “You’re sure about this? Accomplice to murder is like… really bad. You’re gonna go to jail.”

“A few years if they only consider me guilty of concealing the murder after the fact,” Selene said as if reciting facts committed to memory. “Up to a life sentence if they consider me an accessory. I know.”

Chantal’s eyes went wide. “Life?!” she yelled. “Selene, fuck, you can’t do this!”

“I can’t let him go free, Chantal!” she shouted back. “If he’s going down, he’s gonna bring me down with him, no ifs, ands, or buts. That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

“That’s not a sacrifice,” Bryan muttered towards his window. “That’s what you _deserve_.”

She shrank in her seat.

“Bryan, he _tricked_ her,” Chantal protested. “It wasn’t her fault.”

“I don’t want to talk about this right now,” he snapped. “I’m tired. I haven’t slept in twenty-eight hours. I don’t want to talk about this.”

It took several more seconds, but Chantal finally closed her mouth in defeat. She kept her finger on the one hope she had left: the pulse running through Cal’s veins.

 

They did not put a poster beside his bed, but the third notebook they bought him had a completely white cover, so he could write the messages there, large enough for him to see when he woke up alone with a month-long blank in his memory.

**ANTEROGRADE AMNESIA**

**Hai vinto tu e nessun saprà**

**Ian did it + made Selene help**

**~~Nupur has retrograde now you absolute fuckup~~ **

**_she’s better now so stop beating yourself up about it_ **

The last message was in an unfamiliar hand. He thought it was Chantal’s. He was not sure why he thought it was Chantal’s. He had not seen Chantal in two years. He barely knew her at all.

But when he said her name in his mind, he felt her laugh ring in his ears. He saw her smile shine through adversity. The word _hero_ came to mind. He could not remember why.

 

“You’re better now?” he asked when he saw Nupur by his bedside. He did not remember how she got there. He did not remember how he got there, in that hospital bed, but it felt familiar.

She was not surprised, because she saw it written in permanent marker on his newest journal. “You’re getting better, too,” she said.

 

His mother had withered a decade in the past two years. The fight in her eyes that he knew from his childhood had dimmed, but he could see that small flame flickering back to life when she looked at him.

“Every time I first wake up, I can’t remember anything. It’s all blank at first,” he said. “And every time, I know I’m a boy.”

“How do you know that happens every time?”

 

Lily entered the room when he was already awake, he thought. Maybe he woke up when she came in. It was hard to tell when he felt like he was waking up from a long slumber every half hour.

“Where’s Chantal?” he asked.

Her eyes went wide.

 

“I remember these little things,” he told Nupur. “It’s like waking up from a really long dream and all you remember is one little part in the middle.”

“Do you dream?” she asked. “Can you remember if you dream?”

He remembered the sound of the EKG accelerating more than he remembered the way his heart felt when it burst or the touch of her fingers on the back of his hand.

 

Pavarotti was holding out the most victorious high B in all of musical history, one that Puccini had never intended.

“There’s not supposed to be a fermata,” he mumbled.

“I _know_ , buddy.”

_Hero_.

“I… I said that before, didn’t I?” he said in a creaking voice.

His eyes snapped open when she grabbed him by the shoulders and started shaking. He didn’t remember what words she said after that, just that it was her voice, a sound that had the same uplifting tone as her laughter.

 

“So you remember the games?” Bryan asked.

“I remember that the game happened,” he said. “I don’t remember shit about the game, but when I woke up and I looked at the notebook, I was like, yeah, the game happened, that’s right. I felt like I already knew it happened, in the back of my mind somewhere. But more like somebody told me it happened. I can’t remember anything that actually happened.”

“I don’t think you’re ever gonna remember the past,” Bryan said. “I think you’re just starting to remember more of what’s happening to you now. You’re moving forward.”

 

“The doctor thinks it could help to put you back on your hormones,” his mother said. She was uncomfortable, but she was trying. “I signed it. I said everything was okay.”

A tear ran from the inner corner of his eye along the crease under his eyelid and across his cheekbone. “I love you,” he whispered.

He had his hands tucked against his pillow as he curled up in his bed. His mother still called him only _honey_ and _sweetie_ and said the wrong things when talking to someone else about him, but the name on his hospital bracelet finally said Cal Anderson.

 

Chantal had made him add another line at the bottom of the notebook cover. He knew it was Chantal’s idea as soon as he woke up and saw it again. She wanted it to be in his handwriting, for him to be the one to write it, because the word was conjugated for the first person. She wanted him to see it and think it every time his brain started with a clean slate.

**VINCERÒ**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **THE END... OR IS IT?**
> 
> I mean this is definitely what I'm gonna call the end of the novel, but as you can see there are uh nine thousand words missing for a nano. Plan is to write some backstory or continued-epilogue drabbles until I work my way up to 50k.
> 
> _please make requests if you have anything you'd like to see oh my god i need help_


	14. Video Games, Revisited

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Snapshots of Chantal and Lily being dorks and playing ZE together because that was a ROCK SOLID suggestion thank you. (I continue to try not to spoil the games too much by leaving out names and specifics but.... y'all are here because you played these games already right......? shame I probably spoil the third game the most)
> 
> The girls also do soul-searching talk that is 500% autobiographical and I'm a little sorry but only a little.

“Wait, what?” Chantal tilted it in her hands with a puzzled frown. “Why the hell is there two screens?”

“The bottom one’s a touch screen,” Lily explained, reaching under Chantal’s thumb to hit the power button.

“So? What’s the other screen for?”

“Just… It’ll make sense when you start playing. It’s intuitive, I promise.”

It did not make sense when she started playing, though the screens were not at fault. “This shit is complicated!” she groaned. “First I gotta _find_ everything, but it’s all hidden inside picture frames and pillows and whatever, and then I have to put them together? Fuck, Juhn-pee’s gonna drown.”

“It’s Junpei,” Lily corrected.

“Juhn-pay?”

“ _Joon_. Ugh, we should’ve waited till the voice-acted one came out.”

 

Chantal let out a whoop of laughter when the distorted voice over the speaker addressed themself by name for the first time. She pointed at the text with one hand and elbowed Lily in the side with the other. “There he is!” she cried. “It’s my _boy_! It’s Zero!”

Having been trapped in a real-life version of a Zero Escape game before playing the first game in the series, she anticipated a few small twists. She gave a hearty laugh at Lotus’s _assets_ and called her out as the sexy badass, and when Seven gave a vague answer for how he was kidnapped, she asked if he would be this game’s amnesiac. She said the game had to revolve around something between June and Junpei because they were the only two who knew each other, but Clover and Snake threw her off the trail momentarily.

Still, after she had met all of the characters, she pointed at the white-haired punk and said, “He’s definitely hiding something. I don’t trust this boy far as I can throw him.”

“Do you think he’s Zero?” Lily asked with a devious grin.

“Naw, that’s too obvious,” she said. “But there’s something goin’ on. He’s _big_ , somehow.”

Lily drank in her reaction when the Ninth Man met an early, unexpected fate. She could never truly relive the experience of playing 999 for the first time, but she could come close when she watched a friend talk through their thoughts as they played.

“Aight, so that’s how this is gonna be,” Chantal exhaled. Her shoulders hung low as she held the DS far in front of her, the image of blood spatter on the screens. “Okay. Well. June’s definitely Zero, then. I was thinkin’ it before, but now if the game’s gonna be like that, it’s five hundred percent June. Ooh, or it’s Ace. I’m gettin’ bad vibes from that dude.”

“You’re getting bad vibes from everyone.”

“Naw, Seven and Lotus are a-okay. They’ll be fine. I’m leaning toward pompous-pretentious blind guy being okay, too, but Clover’s definitely got it in her to cut a bitch. And whitey over there—fucking _Santa Claus_ —he’s gonna be a big ole can o’ worms to open up.”

Lily was experienced at leading her friends through these games, so she had already briefed Chantal on the fact that she would not respond to most questions or theories unless they were strictly about the puzzles. She wanted to tell Cal that he had ruined the twists of the Zero Escape series by placing Chantal in his Hex Game.

Chantal had a lot of emotional baggage to carry after it was all over. Lily had almost none. Every chance she got to make Chantal smile, she took.

 

Dissonant strings seeped in through the speakers, interjected by discordant orchestral hits, but Chantal watched with just a bemused grin. “Rest in pieces, motherfucker.”

“I _love_ Snake,” Lily protested.

“Yeah, they made him seem real important just to kill him off like that,” Chantal murmured. “Did I do something wrong?”

“Did you?” Lily asked with a cheeky grin.

“I’m gonna pick the other door next time, from the first set. I don’t remember which one I picked this time, but tell me to pick the other one.”

She had already picked door 5, the door without June, where the Ninth Man lay. She went into this game from a totally detached, chaotic perspective. She had found out Snake was dead because she already betrayed the other players and picked door 3.

 

“Everybody!” she hollered.

Lily had stopped her from throwing the DS across the room by pulling it from her hands.

“ _Everyone_ was dead!” She groaned, got up from the couch, and started stomping around the room. “Who the fuck else is on this boat?! Who stabbed me?! Was it June?! Was it Lotus?! Is _she_ the serial killer?!”

“We can take a break before you start playing, if you want,” Lily suggested.

“No! No.” Chantal flopped back onto the couch, snatching the game from Lily’s lap. “I’m gonna _find_ who killed me, and I’m gonna kill _them_ , and I’m gonna get off this Titanic-ass boat and win the damn game and get the girl unless she’s a murderer or whatever.”

“Sounds good,” replied Lily.

 

“Who the fuck made up this bases shit?!” Chantal demanded after failing to realize that 10 in hexadecimal had the value of sixteen. “Why would you ever count like that?!”

“You’re going to love the third game,” Lily muttered.

 

“Wait, I just get to choose _now_?” Chantal wondered. “That’s some retroactive bullshit. Yeah, Santa, I think he’s cheating, too. …Oh. _Oh_. Junpei, baby, my _boy_.”

After the narrator explained his trick, Junpei made his way to door 1. Chantal had already decided against door 6, she had had quite enough sixes for a lifetime. Lily was considering skipping the knife ending; Chantal did not need any further hints about the murderer’s identity, anyway.

 

“Long wooden handle?!” Chantal shouted. “I fucking called it! That’s the motherfucking axe, right there! She’s gonna fuckin’ murder somebody!”

Junpei died.

Chantal dropped the DS as the screen and the music faded out. She grabbed Lily’s shoulders.

“I. Fucking. Love her.”

Lily kissed her smile. She kicked the DS closed as they fell into a pile on the couch, kissing and giggling.

 

“I love Seven. I’m still crackin’ up about his fuckin’ standup with the showerhead way back in the beginning,” she said, skimming through dialogue that Lily wished she would read. “And the undercover detective shit? Dude. I love him. He’s my guy. Fuckin’ hero.”

Lily winced. “Yeah, well… don’t go with him this round,” she said. “Pick door 8.”

“I did door 8 last time! I wanna see door 7,” Chantal whined.

“We’ll get there, Chantal.”

It was one of those days where the temperatures spiked in the middle of a descent into winter, so they linked elbows and strolled through a nearby park. As Chantal made her way through the second room behind door 6, Lily led them back to her apartment.

“Okay! So she’s _not_ the murderer,” Chantal sighed as she sank into the couch, eyes glued to the screens. “She’s dead. She’s super dead. But I’m super alive, which fucking hasn’t happened to me before. Am I actually gonna get to go through the 9 door this time?”

“Something soon is going to be a little familiar to you,” Lily said, a smile creeping onto her face.

Chantal found the message from Zero.

“Cal was _totally_ following this playbook,” she breathed. “‘I must punish them.’ Holy shit. Cal.”

“This is my favorite Zero,” Lily said. “It’s my favorite game overall—I think it just has the best atmosphere, and that really sells it—but this was the moment I really liked Zero, you know? Because I went through this whole game thinking, who’s the evil guy who trapped us here? And then we get this note, and it’s like, no, we shouldn’t have been looking for the _evil_ person. We’re looking for the _hero_.”

 

“Shit. He’s straight-up just… just crazy evil.”

When Lily had met this twist, she had not been expecting it at all, and she smiled through the entire reveal because of it. The moment felt sour this time, especially when Chantal’s face went blank as she gazed vacantly at the screen and did not press A.

Ian was too similar. He had been charming and friendly, if a bit irritable. He felt honest. He had a trustworthy smile. He had killed someone without regret.

But his warm persona was not a disguise for a coldblooded core like a satisfying video game antagonist. Ian was the same person underneath the surface. Ian was grey.

Lily slid one arm behind Chantal and the other around her waist. The words passed by a little too quickly to read completely. Lily did not say anything to Chantal about skipping dialogue this time.

Then he pulled out a gun.

Lily reached up towards the DS at the same time Chantal snapped the screens shut.

“Sorry,” Lily whispered.

“Lily, don’t. It’s a good game.”

“I… I should have told you about him.”

“You woulda spoiled the whole damn story.”

Lily’s dirty-blonde roots sat right under Chantal’s chin. She thought about kissing it, like that was what she was supposed to do, but she did not feel up to the task.

“Can we pick this back up tomorrow?” she asked.

“If you want to,” Lily mumbled.

“I’ll want to tomorrow. I just… you know.”

She threw her head back and stared at the ceiling lights. Lily did not find out it was to keep tears from spilling out.

 

“What happens after?” Chantal asked.

Lily was mashing through the buttons to get back to the spot where they had left off last night, because the DS battery died overnight and Chantal had last saved before making decisions about whether the right or the left hand was more sinister. Chantal was scrambling eggs for breakfast. Neither of them were particularly good cooks, but they each had their own specialties. Chantal could decorate ramen noodles three or four different ways, with vegetables frozen or fresh, cheeses, and spices that did not contain near-lethal amounts of sodium. Lily had a knack for making up juices and sauces to throw in with chicken in her two-quart slow-cooker, or even in a frying pan. They both had a baked good they could make from scratch and by heart: mint chocolate chip cookies for Lily, dark chocolate brownies for Chantal (with or without cannabis).

“He was about to fuck off, actually,” Lily said.

“Nice.” Chantal flipped over the pan and unceremoniously dumped the eggs onto a single plate with two forks. “I mean, whatever. He’s just a video game character. He’s a _good_ character.”

“I think he could have been written better, actually,” Lily murmured.

Chantal rediscovered her motivation to finish the game when she thought about being able to read Lily’s fiction afterwards. She slid the eggs in front of Lily and grabbed the DS out of her hands. “I’m gonna murder him,” she said. “I said I’d murder him.”

 

She did not murder him.

“Holy… holy shit,” Chantal uttered as the roar of flames blared through the tiny speakers. She stared up at Lily with wide eyes.

“This is my favorite ending,” she admitted.

“Are you Satan?”

“I’ve actually been asked that same question twice before, but never in person.”

 

Chantal was supposed to drive back home that afternoon. Tomorrow would start the second of her two weeks’ notice. Lily lived closer to the rehab center Cal was staying in and had an apartment to herself. The café downtown had accepted Chantal’s application. She liked the aesthetic better than the one back home. She had always liked working in cafés for their atmosphere. The occasional impossible customer did not often get under her skin; she had been in the business long enough to laugh them off.

Lily, on the other hand, came home with something to complain about her job every day. Chantal did not quite understand what she did; it was one of those jobs that defies a title but has to get done. “But it’s with a magazine, you know? It’s the industry I want to be in,” she explained when Chantal challenged her to quit if she hated it so much. “I have to start here to get anywhere else. I’m doing good work. They’re noticing. I’ll do the corporate bullshit to move up.”

“Why do you have to do corporate bullshit to write?” Chantal asked. “Can’t you just… _write_?”

“I don’t make much money when I just write.”

“That’s because you post it on the internet for free.”

“No one’s going to pay to read what I write. I like doing editing, really. And that’s stable.”

“Sell someone your writing. Before I finish all these video games, you sell somebody your writing.”

“That’s… not how it works. Also the second game is long as shit, so that’s a pretty distant deadline.”

“Then _do_ it, you big baby.”

“Go through door 1, Chantal. There’s seven hours of gameplay left.”

“I’m ready. Murderer party in the captain’s quarters. Let’s fuckin’ _go_.”

 

It was pitch black outside, and Chantal had tears running down both cheeks, when into the stillness of Morphogenetic Sorrow filling the room, she bawled, “Is this a fucking _Sudoku_?!”

 

Lily still forbade her from reading the fanfiction tagged under 999. “I think I spoil some stuff from the third game in everything,” she protested. “Once you finish VLR, there’s one I wrote before ZTD came out, you can read that one. But it’s really old, since it was right after VLR, and I was, like, nineteen, so it’s kind of shit, so—”

“You’re not selling your writing,” Chantal teased.

 

Lily was not supposed to check her phone except when she took her lunch break, but it had buzzed five consecutive times within the past minute, so she snuck a peek.

`Chantal: WHAT THE FUCK`

`Chantal: WHO THE FUCK IS HE`

`Chantal: THE GUY WITH THE NAME. WHAT THE FUCK. WHAT THE FUCK LILY`

`Chantal: WHY DOES HE HAVE HER PICTURE WHO IS FUCKING GOING ON`

`Chantal: WHO IS FUCKING GOING ON LILY??? WHO?????????`

Lily was a little disappointed. Chantal preferred playing the puzzles by herself because she felt pressured by Lily’s omniscient judging, which was fair, but then Lily specifically told Chantal not to pass this very plot lock until they were together so that she could watch Chantal’s reaction live. At the very least, this probably meant that Chantal had traversed this timeline near the end of her playthrough. Lily had very strong feelings that there were wrong ways to play Virtue’s Last Reward, and getting Tenmyouji End too early on was one of them.

The texts were more than entertaining enough to make up for the fact that she could not be there while Chantal played. She took an unnecessary bathroom break so that she could crop a screenshot of a Tumblr post with a “who is she” caption and join it to a picture of the old woman.

Within ten seconds, she received the response of “FUCK” with seventeen exclamation points followed by a smattering of random emojis.

 

“Oh, gosh, my poor, sweet, little robot,” Chantal cooed as the Blue Bird’s Lamentation swelled louder. “I loved her. She reminded me of you, at least when you were helping us play the game. Really quiet and shy, but you just wanted to help and get the game moving so that everyone could win.”

“Huh,” said Lily. “Because of all the Zero Escape characters, I decided you were most like Sigma. He has no idea what’s going on, and he’s not really patient enough to figure it out, but he just leaps into the action like, okay, how can I save the world, y’know?”

“And they’re totally dating.”

“She’s… she’s a robot, Chantal.”

“ _Dating_.”

“Okay, you might actually like my fanfics, if you’re gonna look at any two characters who have a scene together and say they’re dating.”

 

`Chantal: lily ur killin me with this`

`Chantal: their fuckin faces. i cant watch this anymore`

`Chantal: this cutscene has been going for 20 min. i have to get back to the counter in five minutes ago but this fuckin cutscene`

`Chantal: OH MY GOD PUT YOUR DICK AWAY IM AT WORK HOLY FUCK IS THIS REALLY HAPPENING? NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK`

Lily had no real interest in viewing this scene with Chantal. They were nowhere near a stage in their relationship in which they would be comfortable watching porn together.

 

“Alright, that’s just stupid,” Chantal said as the old man rose out of his wheelchair and began to speak.

“Just you wait,” Lily muttered. “What makes you say it’s stupid?”

“Zero’s not _really_ one of the players. That’s twisting the most basic rule in the franchise,” she protested.

“I’ll show you a list of all the Zero hints when you’re done playing. That made me like the twist better.”

As reluctant gunfire took the lives of everyone in the room, Chantal shook her head at the screens again. “He’s not even a hero this time,” she muttered. “This whole game was just dark for the sake of being dark.”

 

The triumphant declarations of the characters in the ending cutscene were delivered, one cheesy line after another.

“That doesn’t make him a hero,” Chantal protested.

“This Zero is doing something a lot more heroic than the Zero from the first game,” Lily pointed out. “The Zero from the first game was just out for personal gain, if you think about it. This is saving the world.”

“He’s not a hero,” she repeated.

“What, just because he’s a pretentious asshole?”

“You know I hate those types.”

“Snake, though.”

“I’m sorry, all I could hear when you said that was _pretentious asshole_.”

The final decision was presented. The credits began to roll. Chantal shook her head at the abrupt ending.

“So that’s it? I’m… I’m done?” she asked. “Hey, wait, did you ever try sending your writing to people? I finished the games. That was the deadline.”

Lily rolled her eyes. “Chantal. It’s _not_ good,” she said for the three-hundredth time. “I’m gonna learn more if I can move up from my job, and I’ll actually have the skills to write better. I’m a complete amateur right now.”

“Do you _have_ to learn it from going to a job you hate?” Chantal asked. “Can’t you, like, just take a class or something?”

“I have a journalism degree.”

“Then you have skills! You have skills you’ve applied on your own time more than anyone else! I’ve _seen_ how much is on your account, you’ve written like three hundred thousand words!” Chantal hooked her arms around Lily’s neck to come close enough to strangling her without the aspect of asphyxiation. “Sell. Your. Writing. Holy shit.”

“Okay, first off, I can’t sell shit that’s got copyrighted IP in it,” Lily said, counting this as the first of many points.

“Cal said you have a website for your original fiction, too. I can’t figure out how to get to it, but I’m gonna make him tell me.”

Lily pulled out her second finger with another roll of her eyes. “Selling a sci-fi novel that’s got like eighty-percent queer characters to a publishing firm isn’t exactly feasible. They want queer, or they want sci-fi, and if they want sci-fi, it has to be actually good, and if they want queer, it has to be angsty bullshit about gay people coming out and dealing with self-image and hating themselves because the straights don’t wanna hear stories about gay people being normal and happy. God forbid someone try to write a trans main character. They better be”—she held up her fingers in double quotes so that Chantal could hear the unnecessary capitalization and trademark in her voice—“a _good transgender_ who hates herself for being ugly and tries to be hyper-feminine so nobody has to be confused when they see her. What’s a trans guy. Never happens. Forget about non-binary people.”

“Okay, so, like, what if you _don’t_ write a novel,” Chantal said, “because you’re interested in writing for a magazine, anyway, and you submit articles about all of your extremely strong opinions, because I am depriving the world by being the only one who gets to hear this stuff. Like, find gay magazines and critique gay literature.”

“Writing book reviews would be a dream,” Lily sighed.

“So _write_ them.”

 

Lily quit her job, but not because her submissions to magazines jumpstarted an amazing freelance writing career. In fact, she started working at the café with Chantal.

“I think I just can’t handle that corporate environment,” she had said in the weeks leading up to the decision. “Like, if there wasn’t this hierarchical bullshit about who has to talk to who, and we weren’t crammed like sardines into what’s really only an open office because they want to make sure nobody’s slacking and they don’t have the room for actual cubicles…”

“Here’s the thing I realized about working your dream job,” Chantal said. “Once you have _any_ job you don’t hate, you can come home and you’re at least not in a terrible mood, and you literally have no obligation to your paycheck for the next sixteen hours or whatever. You just made money, and you can do whatever you want. And that’s the time for your dream job, but you don’t have to make it your job. You don’t have to monetize it anymore. You can just do it.”

In her brief college stint, Chantal had been a fine arts major. Her paintings were wild with color and emotion. She decided to drop out between her freshman and sophomore years when she started working a job at a café so that she could stay in town over the summer. The paintings decorated not only their apartment, but her friends’. She painted out of love for it again, something she felt herself losing while she was in school.

Lily kept writing fiction in every fandom and genre she could access. She told Chantal one night that she had finally stopped measuring her worth in stats and learned the importance of writing an entire story if it would connect to a single person. It gave her that sense of accomplishment she once thought that traditional publishing would give her. She just needed someone to write for other than herself every once in a while.

She stopped sending out her articles and stories to magazines and publishers. She posted them on her Tumblr. She was interacting with people across the world who had something to say about what she had written. A childhood dream coming true looks different than expected as a child, but it feels greater than the child could have imagined.


	15. The Stable Matching Problem, Revisited

Nupur remembered the password to an email address she kept in high school. She linked that one as an emergency recovery account to the personal email she set up during undergrad so that she could do networking with a more professional name than nyanyanupur527. She requested a lost password for nupur.mukherji527 that was sent to her high school address. Then, when she did not find the emails she was looking for in her newer personal account, she requested a lost password for her email from grad school. That was the only way Cal knew how to reach out to her.

He kept up the façade of being the person he was when they met, despite how his transition must have been progressing. He used the school email address based on his deadname and even signed the email using it, though only for the first message in their correspondence.

> I was wondering if I could get a copy of your thesis on the stable matching problem variations? I’m actually working on a personal project that might explore a similar algorithm, so I was hoping I could use your research as a starting point.

Her reply was sweet and littered with exclamation points to make sure she did not sound too cold in print. Not that she had figured out how not to sound cold in real life. There had to be at least one medium through which she could express that she had genuine interest in the world around her if her calm face and timid voice could not.

> Let me know if you have any questions! I’d be happy to help. Can I ask more about the project?

Cal mimicked that style of writing in his responses. It was a topic of discussion in the modest ACM-W chapter that met on Wednesday evenings, that women, especially in a male-dominated field, felt they had to spruce up a written message to prevent the “virtual equivalent of resting bitch face”.

They had great discussions in that group. Girls became feminists. Women who felt like impostors in their classrooms became confident programmers at the top of their class. But Cal had never joined.

_“Do you have class Wednesday nights next semester?” Nupur asked._

_Cal shook his head. The output of a thousand trials of Nupur’s latest SMP variation generated on his command prompt. Python was a slow language. He did not need all of those print statements._

_He liked running files from the command prompt, even if he wrote and tested them in an IDE originally. He said it made him feel more like a hacker. He gave Nupur impostor syndrome when he drummed up the UNIX shell script for any problem, then immediately translated it into Windows commands when he remembered Nupur had not installed Cygwin onto her computer. She had to tell herself that he had the makings of a systems administrator rather than a software engineer, and remind herself of all the times she caught the errors in his Python programs. It had become a joke last semester, that he would raise his hand in the class she TAed and she would ask, “Did you remember to call main?”_

_It made her smile every time he scrolled to the bottom of his file and let out a groan._

_“You should really come to our first meeting. We usually have pizza, and we go around introducing new members, so you won’t have to feel like the odd one out or anything,” she said. “It’s great for connecting with the other women in the department. So you have someone to reach out to if you have to work on a group project and you don’t want to be the only woman in a group with all men, if that’s an uncomfortable setting.”_

_Cal tucked his unkempt hair behind his ear. “I don’t mind,” he mumbled._

_“It’s just a space for women to talk about any sexism they encounter in the department so we can help each other work through it,” she went on. “It’s a tough field to be a woman in. It’s good to have a network. I just don’t want you to feel like you’re going through it alone.”_

_“I’m… really, fine,” he said, hiking up his shoulders so that his chin-length hair obscured his face._

He never wrote emails like this with her before, she thought. She searched his deadname in her inbox to find proof of it. His emails had never had these unnecessary exclamation points or emoticons. He barely remembered to greet or sign off before. She remembered, when she suddenly received these emails months ago, thinking he seemed different than when she had known him at school. In retrospect, she wondered if he was hamming it up after years of not having to pretend to be a girl anymore.

> The project’s kind of complicated proprietary stuff for this internship I’m doing at a startup. It’s not that exciting… but I’m learning a lot!
> 
> The basic idea is that they need to make multiple stable matches - getting the top two matches from a group. I was wondering if the idea would be to do the matchings separately! The first one would be the typical, and the second would be like the variation where there are certain off-limit matches. But if this has a chance of failing depending on what the rankings are, that wouldn’t work…
> 
> Thanks so much for all your help!

It was no wonder Cal had named the function gale_shapley_mukherji in the end. She designed the brunt of the algorithm, despite the fact that he was pretending it was for a job. She remembered thinking that women had to lift up other women, and that startups were often home to a dangerous culture for female programmers, especially those just getting started in the field. She wanted to give him this boost, and she liked thinking about the Stable Matching Problem in her spare time, anyway, which is how she ended up with a published thesis and a Master’s Degree.

The last email from him came two weeks before the Hex Games began.

> We’re implementing the algorithm into our project! Thank you SO much.
> 
> Are you still in the west PA area? I’m actually stopping by to visit friends around fall break. It would be great to see you if that’s possible. If not, can I get your address? I’d like to send you something :)

She sent him her address.

She thought on it for a long time and decided he would not have been able to get everything he needed out of her if he had not pretended to be a woman. Female engineers have to maintain a layer of coldness thicker than those of most feminists to protect them from the men recklessly building a toxic environment.

So she ended her sentences with smiley faces and exclamation points. She felt she had to apologize within the first sentence for bothering someone with an email, and thank them at the end for deigning to read the whole thing, perhaps even to respond. Coldness and warmth twisted and turned her into a perfect model, an expressionless mannequin that was tough enough to stick it out with the guys but not tougher than them, heaven forbid. So when she lost her memories, she completely lost herself.

She picked up the pieces one by one, and put herself together better than before.

She was Nupur Mukherji. Her driver’s license said so. She knew how to drive, then.

She liked cats. Her roommate had two cats. She had a roommate.

Cal did send her something. A mug with a cat on it.

_I remember you used to wear cat socks every day,_ he had written in his rough handwriting. _I hope you don’t drink as much coffee as you used to, but if you do, here’s another mug so you don’t have to wash the dishes yet._

She liked coffee. She felt her mind stir with the smell that still lingered in her apartment when she finally returned home. Her roommate poured her some in the cat mug. The subtle bitterness underneath the full flavor brought her mind into focus.

She was Nupur Mukherji, and she was going to remember everything about herself with sheer willpower.

When she opened her laptop—thank goodness, the PIN to unlock it was her birthday—her web browser still had several tabs open. She scanned social media to piece her life together. She found her real-life relationships on Facebook and the casual ones she carried out over Tumblr and Pinterest with strangers.

Nupur Mukherji liked talking to people. But not as much as she liked talking to cats.

“You are so beautiful,” she whispered as she stroked Angel, the blue-eyed white cat currently poising to seat himself on her keyboard. She did not even care. He could claw her in the face and she would thank him for the attention.

Her Pinterest board told her that she liked pastels and Lolita-style fashion. She never wore full Lolita outfits herself, though she noticed that her wardrobe contained a few key pieces. She liked to mix them with more casual attire. A touch of cute amongst the ordinary.

Her Tumblr confirmed her love of pastels and Lolita on her aesthetic blog. Her personal blog, however, was the occasional GIFset of a TV series, a few silly reblogged text posts with a hundred thousand notes each, and the rest was entirely cats. Cats with humans. Cats with other cats. Written stories about cats. Photos and videos. She sifted through the delightful collection for almost a half-hour before it occurred to her that she must have designed her blog’s theme and absolutely implemented automatic content loading on scroll with Javascript, probably overwriting Tumblr’s built-in feature that accomplished the task, because Tumblr’s spaghetti code kept a garbage heap of claimed memory that should have been freed as soon as the media moved off-screen.

Nupur Mukherji was infuriatingly good at remembering completely pointless information after suffering generalized retrograde amnesia.

She sifted through the files on her hard drive. Files did not float about. They were neatly stacked in a hierarchy of folders that made perfect sense to her as she floated her way down. Nupur Mukherji was methodical and organized.

She was a polyglot of technical languages. Under her belt, she had Python, Java, C, C++, C#, F#, a little bit of R, a couple flavors of assembly language, all of the big web languages—HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP—and she had begun a small project in Go. Tutorials and references for it filled a folder in her similarly methodical and organized bookmarks tab in her web browser.

There were clothes all over her floor, some of which were folded. She did not know where clean ended and dirty began. Angel was making his bed in a black sweater. She could not find her laundry detergent and had to borrow her roommate’s. Methodical and organized.

She glimpsed another woman’s first name next to her surname on Facebook. A warm feeling took her heart to see the low-resolution profile picture of her mother’s face. She loved this woman. She looked through her emails to find messages from her mother, and heard a tired, accented voice read them in her head.

She asked about boyfriends almost every email.

Nupur Mukherji was not about boyfriends.

It felt like another fact about herself that turned her into a mannequin, the fact that she did not seek out a romantic relationship with someone. She was rediscovering so many cold tendencies, and she did not want this to be another.

Then she reread through texts and IMs with her close friends. She had seen from her social media presence that she liked to interact with people, but in her private messages, she realized the depth of this interaction. She kept in contact with friends from even high school. The person she talked to the most was evidently a friend since middle school. Her roommate entreated them to eat dinner together and casually divulged very personal information, looking perhaps for advice, but more for comfort and solace.

Nupur Mukherji loved people without being in love with people. Her heart was full already. She did not need a boyfriend.

In her rebirth, then, she vowed to stop calculating compassion in emails to her coworkers. She kept the shield that she had wrought with feminism, but shed some of the armor. She would be human. She would touch every heart she could reach.

Cal was not a woman in tech like she had thought when she met him, but that did not stop her from wanting to reach him. That was always what she had wanted when she badgered him about joining the ACM-W.

As a withdrawn student, Cal looked no different to Nupur from the young female engineers struggling to find their confidence without a network of supportive allies. She wanted to reach inside him, to open him up. She came closer to doing that when she teased him about forgetting to call main than when she tried to interest him in joining a club for women. In fact, he closed right up again every time she breached that topic, though she had never noticed the correlation.

_“I’m not really sure I want to be a woman in tech,” he mumbled._

_“You don’t have to be to join the group,” she said. “There are lots of CS and web programming minors, and even girls who are just taking a class this semester and want to learn a little more. And I know tech isn’t for everybody, and I don’t want to push or anything—but I know a lot of women feel dissuaded from joining or staying in technology fields because they feel forced out because of a lack of confidence, which is a big focus of our lean-in circles.”_

_“I’m confident that I don’t really want to be a woman in tech,” Cal retorted._

_Of the five students working with her and her faculty supervisor this summer on the stable matching variations, only Cal stayed past four o’clock during the week and came in on weekends. He was making up hours lost in the middle of the day to the liberal arts classes he was cramming into his summer schedule in hopes of graduating on time with a double major in music and computer science. More often than not, however, they left the lab well past six and talked about getting dinner together. He put in more than his required hours. She told him so when she started to notice bags under his eyes._

_“The last two or three hours are half socializing anyway,” he said with a crooked grin and a shrug, holding up a fat, broken, steaming French fry as he waited for it to cool enough to eat. “It all evens out.”_

_Sometimes they would get so deep in conversation that she felt something electric in his eye contact, something that roared through her body like a gust of hot wind. More than once she wondered whether the reason she had never found a boyfriend was because, despite her childhood crushes on her male friends, she was better suited to a girlfriend._

But Cal had been a boy, after all. He was closed off in different ways now, including the physiological ones he could not control. She wanted to reach him now more than ever, especially now that she had finally met his true self.

It was a bit out of the way, but she liked to visit whenever she could, especially when Chantal or Lily said they could not make the trip. Inside room 106 of St. Catherine’s Hospital and Rehabilitation Center, Cal lay on his side in a tangle of his sheets. He smiled when he saw her now, instead of becoming frightened.

“Nupur,” he said weakly.

“How are you, Cal?”

“Everybody knows my name. I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody my name.” He stared at his hospital bracelet. “How’d everyone figure out my name?”

“You told us,” she said, taking a seat in the chair by his bed. “Thanks for telling us.”

He squinted at her like he was trying to work something out in his sluggish head. “Are you… okay?” he asked.

“I’m alright,” she said. “What makes you ask?”

“I thought something… something happened to you,” he said. “Wasn’t it my fault?”

Their recovery took vastly different trajectories. The organic memories she was still missing, she could replace with verbal retellings, with records kept on her computer and online. She filled in the holes in the manuscript of her life with scribbled explanations on sticky notes. Over time, she synthesized her old self back to life.

Cal could learn and relearn and relearn again what had happened during the Hex Games, but the information would not stick for longer than fifteen minutes. He pieced himself together and immediately fell apart again. Nupur had not fully recovered all of her lost memories, but she did not need to. In Cal’s case, he could not live until his amnesia was completely eradicated.

At first, she could not bear to visit for much longer than his memory lasted. It was heartbreaking to watch him forget how she had gotten here, to ask questions he had just heard answered ten minutes ago. Somewhere along the way, she started to take comfort in the fact that he would listen and respond to her but lose his memory of it within the half-hour.

“I really valued our friendship when we were working on research over the summer,” she said with a shy smile. “I think it would have been really hard to be there all summer if you hadn’t been there, when most of the campus was empty.”

“Y-yeah,” he mumbled. “Me too. With… with you.”

“I’ve never been in a romantic relationship before,” she said. “I think it’s just not something I’m interested in. But I love having really close relationships with my friends. I’m not sure it’ll ever be the same between us again, after everything that’s happened, but I… I’d still like to be your friend, in that kind of way.”

The thing about spilling her guts to him unabashedly because he would soon forget was that it prompted him into speaking freely, too. She, however, would carry and remember what he said from one half-hour to the next, while he forgot he had ever said it.

“I told Bryan I wanted smart people to be the other two Q-Type players,” he said. “Because it would be that question-answer type thing. Smart people could figure out what to do if I couldn’t. But I think I was just making excuses.”

It was another five minutes before he had reached that hazy state that made him confess things he would not ordinarily say.

“I missed you,” he slurred. “I never had a friend like you before. You’re so nice, and you’re smart, and you were nice to me for no reason, and I… I missed you, Nupur.”

She said the same thing every time she was about to leave. It was a memory on the cusp of his blackout. Every time she visited, she wanted to see if he would remember it.

“Thank you for the mug,” she said with a smile. “It’s so cute. I use it every day.”

And usually, he would say the same thing in response: “What mug?”

She brought it in to show him once. He smiled and turned it around in his hands, as if seeing it for the first time.

On that day, when she gave her parting message, he said, “You drink too much coffee.”

Chantal and Lily kept in minimal touch with her, to avoid treading on mixed feelings. The topic usually turned to Cal whenever they spoke. There was an influx of messages when Cal’s memory began to show measured improvement, when he recalled things that had happened up to days prior.

The next time she visited, he seemed no different. He asked if she was getting better when she came in, but that was a prompt from a note on the cover of his third notebook. She gave her parting message.

“You say that every time,” he said, his voice muffled by the pillow.

She came back to his bedside with a quivering smile as he closed his eyes. “I do,” she whispered. “Every time.”

She had tried to tell as few people as possible about her run-in with anesthesia-induced amnesia. It would worry her friends and family, and it would invite questions that could compromise the integrity of the secret of the Hex Games. She confided in her roommate, who, as a good roommate should with most matters, did not want to pry. The receipts of her brief hospital stay and follow-up visits came to her workplace to validate her short-term disability claims, but patient confidentiality kept everyone from knowing too much. She returned only after sifting through files from home and catching up with what she used to work on.

She did not even tell her mother and father. She restricted their conversations to email until she got a better grasp on herself and regained the confidence to call home. Her mother still noticed a change in her demeanor through written words alone, and asked her if she had found a boyfriend.

It was a rudimentary understanding of something that had happened to her. She responded that it was not so serious, she would not call him a boyfriend, but, in a way, yes, she had found someone special.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all of the heroes in this story are queer. sorry i dont make the rules (actually i do make the rules, and the rules say everyone has to be queer)
> 
> you may have noticed i found a trend for my bonus chapter titles. there will be two more. in my word doc i'm less than 200 from goal and I've not yet started the last chapter, so it's probably going to be very short and a little bit goofy. the next chapter, which I'm polishing now, however, is.......... sad


	16. First Hex, Revisited

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNING: abusive relationship, primarily verbal. also murder. and suicide mentions.
> 
> this is what happens when someone suggests unreliable narrator selene im sry

Selene actually did not remember anything between the moment she found herself facing Timothy Anderson’s turned back and when Ian leaned through her car window to give her a kiss in the parking lot outside the office of his day job. She remembered that touch of his lips, because she remembered thinking it tasted like poison, before she even knew about the vial he was toying with in his pocket. And then she did not remember anything until they were inside the shed.

She Googled around about repressing memories after the fact, finding exactly what she thought she knew about it already, which was that it was probably bullshit. She masked the reason for her questions when she asked about it to Lucy, who was in the midst of a doctorate program to become a psychologist. Lucy asked whether she was feeling panicked during the span of memories she did not remember, because a body engaged in the sympathetic nervous response of fight or flight might not properly process events into memories. Selene said that sounded about right.

“You can go wait in the car if you’re gonna cry,” he snapped.

She did not remember the sputtered words that came out of her mouth, but she was begging him to stop, to resolve this some other way.

“It’s just a little more than a regular dose of anesthetics,” he lied. “It’s just gonna wipe his memories so he doesn’t remember what he saw yesterday. We’ll grab dinner, go home, and call the police soon as Chantal starts wondering where he is.”

In her memory of Timothy Anderson’s back, the air in the apartment carried the renewed scent of pot. That was the only reason Selene had struck. Chantal would not leave the smoky den of her room to investigate a strange noise, she decided.

She liked thinking that it was partially Chantal’s fault. The guilt was too heavy to shoulder alone. Every person she could pawn some off on, she did.

“It’ll look like a suicide attempt,” he said, positioning Tim’s limp, perhaps already lifeless arms with gloved hands.

The authorities did not release pictures of the crime scene, of Tim slumped over with a spot of blood on his left forearm and a mostly-empty syringe dangling from the fingers of his right hand. Selene had to carry that image with her and pretend she had not seen it, because knowing it would give them away.

“Don’t fucking tell anybody,” he growled into the phone. “You snitch on me, you go to prison as long as I do. You’re an accessory to murder.”

With a shaking voice and fumbling hands, she engaged him on the topic while she opened her computer and started recording audio. She learned how to save and back up texts in a way that preserved their authenticity, after she started worrying that he would call her screenshots Photoshopped fakes if she tried to show someone. She kept everything on a USB thumb drive attached to her keyring.

He smashed the USB stick under his shoe during an argument one night. It was not much of an argument, really; it was more of a screaming session. He was stressed. The investigation was turning towards suspicions of foul play.

“How could you fucking take him without his contacts?!” he roared.

“Stop shouting,” she said, glancing at the walls. She did not mind the shouting itself anymore, but they were in a thin-walled apartment complex.

There was no way she could have known whether or not Tim had been wearing his contacts when she took him down. He knew this, as well. He just needed to vent.

“You piece of _shit_!” He grabbed her by the shirt, heaving breaths through his gritted teeth. “You fucking _idiot_!”

He would not hurt her. He had hurt her for the first and last time months ago. They talked it out afterwards and resolved to practice martial arts together to help him with his aggression in healthier ways. They never went to an actual class; they just watched YouTube videos and tried moves on each other. Classes cost too much money and required them to keep a fixed schedule. He said he wanted to be the only one to get to kick her ass. She complained, offered to pay and drive, when they could not find enough information on a move, or they hurt themselves because they lacked the necessary protection, or the downstairs neighbors started banging on the ceiling with a broom handle when their footwork got too noisy.

“If it weren’t for me, you’d be fucking _dead_ ,” he seethed. “You _owe_ me. It was _my_ idea to train you at home. If we were taking classes, your fat ass would be in jail.”

His motive for murder had sprung up only a day before the crime itself, so she ruled out the possibility that he had trained her to be his capable servant for this very purpose. The wording still made her wonder about what the original intent had been. On the surface, the reason they had agreed to practice martial arts was to diffuse tension during arguments by challenging one another to a physical fight and getting those aggressive emotions out in a safe way. She could barely open her mouth to defend herself, let alone to tell him to engage in a play fight rather than scream about how she ruined their perfect murder.

He turned soft and apologetic within an hour, as usual. She knew this was a textbook pattern. But she normalized the fights. In her head, it was not bad enough to leave. She loved him at his best and she could tolerate him at his worst. She would have stayed with him for much longer had she not found herself waking up every morning and having to reconcile with the fact that she was dating a murderer.

She still waited for him to mention needing space before she broke up with him, and she was careful to frame it in a way that made it seem like this was in his best interest, and a sacrifice on her part.

It was nice to be able to say he was an abusive partner to the police. From an objective standpoint, his actions could be classified as abuse, so she used it as an excuse to make it so she never had to see him again. She did not feel like a victim. She had always known how to handle him. She just did not want to see him again.

It took her a while to realize that she did not want to see him because she was afraid of what he would do or say to her now. She really did need to be protected.

She was not innocent. Her parents believed she was, and hired a lawyer committed to proving it. They feasted on the evidence of blackmail that she had been compiling over the years (he may have destroyed her USB stick, but she had backed everything up to her computer, and then to Google Drive after his little stunt). They vowed to absolve her of any crimes.

But she remembered Timothy Anderson’s turned back, and how she had flipped him over onto his head at her boyfriend’s command. No blackmail involved. Emotional manipulation, yes, he was skilled at that particular technique, but no blackmail. Not yet.

She did not listen to her father’s angry, determined tirades maintaining her complete innocence. She did not listen to her weeping mother’s pleas. She listened only to the lawyer explaining the legal ramifications of her actions as she presented them, and which ones would likely hold up in a court of law based on the evidence they had gathered.

It did not help that she could barely remember anything from that day.

Her mom took her to a therapist who believed in repressed memories and other Freudian bullshit that Lucy used to laugh and complain about as she studied. “He’s the father of modern psychology and all, but seriously, the only reason he should be in our textbook is as a solid example of projection,” she once said. “Projecting his weird mommy fetish on the entire fucking world.”

She wished she could call Lucy on the phone. She wished all of her friends did not hate her. The only emotional support she had on her side was that of her delusional parents, which was not really what she wanted.

When Chantal finally started calling, it was at first a relief. But then even Chantal was sounding like her parents.

“It’s bullshit. It’s not your fault,” she said. “He tricked you into helping him.”

She wanted her loved ones to look her in the eyes, acknowledge her crimes, and still love her. She could only get one or the other. They would acknowledge her crimes and disown her, or they would love her because they had convinced themselves she was somehow innocent. She could not be guilty and loved at the same time, and that hurt more than anything else.

He was going to get his sentence reduced to manslaughter because the texts Selene saved also proved his intent to inject a nonlethal dose. Selene did not believe those texts for a goddamn second, but he knew how to cover his bases when he was about to commit a felony.

She could still be charged for accessory to murder and given a life sentence, if her case did not hold up before the court, and he would go away for a couple decades at most.

She went to sleep thinking that it was worth it. She deserved every second of it.

“Cal’s doing better,” Chantal mentioned at the tail end of an awkward conversation.

Selene’s lips felt funny when she tried to make them smile for the first time in a month. “Tell him I’m sorry,” she said. “And thanks.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the nanowrimo website gives me a significantly lower wordcount than MS Word, which gives me a significantly lower wordcount than ao3 (this is what happens when you put 200 lines of python code in your story????), so this chapter is probably gonna break 50k on here but I still have a 250 word silly chapter to 1. end on a lighter note and 2. actually put me over the 50k threshold for the nano validator


	17. Turandot, Revisited

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as promised: a short and silly chapter to finish things off

Cal’s recall span was not getting any longer than a half hour. He was progressing in a different way now, where some of the events would stick as correctly-formed memories and the rest would vanish as usual. Chantal and Lily got the idea of having a movie night with something he had seen before so he could keep up. Lily opened her laptop and began to type in the Netflix URL when a thought struck her.

“Do you want to watch _Turandot_?” she asked.

Chantal went starry-eyed, but Cal wrinkled his nose and frowned. “Fuck, no,” he said. “Turandot’s a shitty opera. And it’s racist as fuck.”

“Wait, what? Seriously?” Chantal asked.

“It takes place in Peking—so it’s gotta be racist, it’s by an Italian guy and it’s in China—but Turandot’s name is Turkish for whatever the fuck reason,” he rambled, rolling over in his bed. “She’s got three comic relief servants named Ping, Pang, and Pong or some shit. And there’s the prince’s Chinese slave girl who’s weirdly in love with him even though she’s his fucking slave, and of course he doesn’t give a shit and goes after Turandot, and then the slave girl gets fucking executed for not telling Turandot the prince’s name because she loves him so much, and then like _five minutes_ after she dies, the prince is like, eh, fuck it, here’s my name anyway.”

“I thought you really liked _Turandot_ ,” Chantal said.

“I like Pavarotti’s _Nessun dorma_ and that’s it,” he grumbled.

“Okay, so what should we watch?” asked Lily.

Cal narrowed his eyes, staring up at the ceiling. “Pokémon,” he declared.

They watched the second movie.

“Why are we watching Pokémon?” he asked.

“Shut up, it’s good,” hissed Chantal, enthralled.

There were a lot of memories that did not last longer than his half-hour recall span, but he never forgot his friends again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for reading. this was a blast. my life is fuller now. i wish i could hug each and every one of you.


End file.
